Authors: Harry Bingham
‘That’s the name we’re discussing,’ he said primly.
‘Shit, yeah, let me think … it was a while back … only, yeah, we did have to waste a couple of guys. Think one of them could have been a Lundmark, yes.’
‘Could have been?’
‘Was. Was a Lundmark.’
‘And old enough to have a fifteen-year-old boy?’
‘I guess so. Yes. Shit.’
‘You killed the father and you’ve hired his son to run errands for you?’
Willard’s voice was icy. Mason’s voice was unnaturally hushed and submissive as he replied. Something on the phone line between them suddenly took on a deathly edge. Not figuratively, literally. Both men knew what had to be done.
The thing about riding bikes is that it’s fun in the summer, but a pain in winter.
So, as autumn came around, two Ohio bicycle manufacturers, Wilbur and Orville Wright, found themselves bored. Aviation caught their attention. They got hold of the available literature and read it with care. And the more they read, the more they realised that the whole problem now lay with control: how to manoeuvre an aircraft in flight.
Most people before them had thought about using a movable tailplane, rather like the rudder of a ship. But the Wright brothers knew about bicycles, and bikes depend on a different action: the action of banking into a turn. Perhaps aircraft would need to do the same? And perhaps that could be achieved the way birds did it: by turning the tips of one wing up and the tips of the opposite wing down…
It was a good idea. But just having one smart idea didn’t make an airplane. Though the Wright brothers got a start from the literature which George Cayley had first stimulated, they still had to solve every single problem as it came along. How to make the plane light enough? How to make it strong enough? How to design the propeller? How to generate the thrust.
But they were brilliant mechanics – visionary and practical; creative and persistent. One by one, the problems were solved. On 17 December 1903, the Wright brothers made the world’s first true flight: manned, powered and controlled. Over the next two years, they made a series of improvements, culminating in a non-stop flight of no less than twenty-four miles.
And how did the world react to this conquest of the skies? The answer is simple: it didn’t. On the day the Wrights invited the press to witness their accomplishment, the engine had a problem and the Flyer No. 2 didn’t fly. The following day, the press witnessed a sputtering twenty-yard glide. And after that, they just plain weren’t interested. Three years after the Wrights had conquered flight, the number of working airplanes in the world numbered just one.
So, inevitably, the airplane was invented all over again. In France this time, by a dapper little Brazilian, Santos-Dumont. The Brazilian’s plane was less well-designed than the Wrights’, but it conquered the fourth and final challenge of flight: to get into the air in a place where there were pressmen and cameras. In 1906, the age of aviation had truly begun. The world went aviation-crazy, led by the French. Many of the words that describe the airplane come to us from the French, for that reason: fuselage, aileron, aerodrome.
And the Wright brothers’ most lasting achievement? To realise that a plane needed to bank like a bicycle, not steer like a boat. The Wrights’ wing-warping technology itself didn’t last long. Ailerons did the job better and safer. But there it was. Cayley’s magic trio was complete. Lift, thrust, control.
Now it only remained to find people willing to risk their necks and fly.
The hotel was a crummy little dump on the Gulf coast, a few miles up from Naples. Once upon a time, the place had been painted pale green, the colour of seasickness on a girl’s face. But that had been long ago. Since then, sun and rain had amused themselves picking scabs of paint from the flaking wood, splintering and cracking the sagging veranda. A few tough weeds had found footholds in the corners of the red-tiled roof. The sun tried to burn the weeds. The weeds tried to outlast the sun. As a hotel, the place was worse than awful. As a hide-out it was better than excellent.
Jim Bosse and Haggerty McBride looked like – well, they looked like what they were: Washington bureaucrats. Serious men. Dark suits, white shirts, navy ties. Briefcases. Something weighty in their faces, something unsmiling, businesslike and tough. The farmboy look in Bosse’s face was still there, only further back this time, maybe too far to reach.
The two men sat in a private room off the hotel lobby. They rose from their seats as Abe, Pen and Hennessey entered. On the table in front of them, a plate of cookies and a jug of tepid water grew bored together. Everyone sat.
Bosse spoke first. ‘Miss Hamilton, Mr Hennessey, you haven’t met my colleague, Haggerty McBride. He’s been working with me on this case. He’s the only one in the IRS who knows as much as I do about it. ’Most everyone else knows ’most nothing at all.’
McBride shook hands – strong handshakes, but not warm – then sat back down, flicking a couple of crisp white business cards across the table. Nobody looked at them.
Meantime, Bosse opened his briefcase. Photos and documents spilled out. It was everything that the team had accumulated over the last three months. Freighters loading and unloading, bringing the booze that flowed out across America, releasing a whole tide of money in its wake, money and violence, money and blood.
‘Well boys – ma’am – you fellers have done good. No. It’s beyond good. You got everything we wanted. Everything and more.’
‘You got the accounts? The payroll?’
Abe licked his lips. He’d obtained less than Bosse had asked for, more than he himself had hoped for. They had eight weeks’ continuous payroll data. They had a set of management accounts covering the last six months.
‘Yes. Copies. Which I know you’re happy to swear to.’
‘Right.’
‘Of course, it’s a question of whether the courts will acknowledge them. The mob will try to have them struck out as fabrications. But still, Captain, you’re an excellent witness. It ain’t every witness who’s got a drawer full of medals and a citation direct from Congress.’
‘Suppose we produce a witness to authenticate them?’ It was Pen who spoke. Bosse and McBride swivelled to look at her.
‘A witness? Who? It all depends. A court would need to find the person credible.’
‘How about the chief buying agent for the organisation? I’d say he was credible. And a louse, by the way. I hope you stomp on him.’
She pushed a fat manila envelope over the table. The envelope bulged with paper. Bosse opened it and began to read, handing the papers to his partner as he read. ‘Jesus,’ he said after a moment. ‘Jesus.’ The way he said it, it sounded less like a blasphemy, more like an acknowledgement of prayers answered.
He put the package down.
‘You put a wire tap on his phone?’
‘Uh-huh. Hired a bilingual secretary in Havana to transcribe it.’
‘And these conversations… Lambaugh’s taking kickbacks direct from his booze suppliers. He must be making six, maybe seven thousand dollars a month.’
‘At least. A lot of the time he does business face to face and we didn’t pick up anything from the phone.’
Bosse’s grin spread slowly, like a sunflower opening. ‘How the heck did you know? What made you think it’d be a good idea to stick a wire tap on his phone?’
Pen shrugged. ‘Various things. The way he lived… I know it is Havana and all, and his regular salary must be sweet enough. All the same … the cars, the gold watches, the girls. I couldn’t figure it.’
‘And?’
‘And I found a letter changing the security arrangements on Marion’s purchasing account in Havana. That seemed like Bob Mason had some of the same suspicions I did. It seemed worth a try.’
Bosse put his hand on the documents, proprietorially. ‘Does Lambaugh know about this material yet?’
Pen shook her head. ‘No. We figured you might want to tell him.’
‘Sure… I go along there, offer him a choice. He gets to cooperate with us or we hand all this material over to Uncle Bob Mason and your buddy Lambaugh gets to try and explain this to him… Uh-huh, he’ll cooperate, I figure he’ll cooperate.’
He glanced across at McBride, who nodded too. Now it was Bosse’s turn to produce some documents. He doled them out in three piles and pushed them over the table. Abe looked down at his. The documents were all stamped with the crest of the IRS.
‘What the…?’
Bosse chuckled. ‘Sorry, folks. Only looking over our records, it seems like none of you fellers have filled out a tax declaration. We wouldn’t want to go arrest everyone in Marion and then have some smartass lawyer start pointing out that we hadn’t made all the arrests we should’ve.’
Abe and Pen looked at each others incredulous but smiling. Hennessey said nothing, just put his fingertips to the tax documents and pushed them away. With Mason’s money, Abe and Pen had earned plenty that year, easily enough to make a declaration. But the shine on the storekeeper’s suit told its own story, and Bosse took back the third pile in silence. For the next fifteen minutes, Abe and Pen sat side by side, their pens scratching away over the black and white forms. They completed their forms and passed them back to Jim Bosse, who grinned. ‘Ain’t taxmen awful?’ He began folding away the forms. The room was silent.
Abe felt Pen’s love tugging at him from three feet away. He felt strange. If Bosse concluded – as he should do – that their task was complete, then there was no reason for the team to stay together any longer. Abe had his plane to build and fly. But because his mind was far away, it took him a moment or two to realise that Bosse hadn’t yet said what he needed to say. He hadn’t said: ‘Good job, well done, we’ve got everything we need, now there’s nothing more for you folks to do.’ Abe looked over at the two taxmen with sudden concern.
‘Well?’
‘Well, good,’ said McBride, speaking for almost the first time.
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that if we choose to go ahead at this stage, we’ve got absolutely everything we need. Thank you.’
And there it was.
If.
A little word with a big voice. An
if
with no place in that room, not then, not ever.
‘If?’ said Abe a second time, his voice cracking with sudden dryness, ‘What the heck are you talking about
If
?’
Brad Lundmark was eating a sandwich down by the river. The Okefenokee ran dirty green, the colour of pond water mixed with old tea. Brad sat on the dirty concrete quay, leaning up against one of the steel mooring bollards, feeling its warmth against his back. His sandwich was a favourite: smoked ham and dill pickle. That was one of the good things about Marion. Unlike its poor cousin up the hill, Marion had money. Easy money, lots of money. The boarding house where Lundmark stayed had things on its menu which he’d never even heard of in Independence. So he experimented with new things. Smoked ham and dill pickle; new types of soda; candy like he’d never known it.
There was a movement down the quay. Bob Mason was there, hat in his hands, shading his eyes against the sun. He saw Lundmark and approached.
‘Hey there.’
‘Hey.’
‘You’re Lundmark, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Getting on OK?’
‘Yep.’
‘Good. You ain’t had no problems with anyone?’
‘No. Folks have been real nice, sir.’
Brad knew who Mason was – everyone in Marion did – but he didn’t understand why the man had sought him out or what these questions were all about. He shifted position on the quayside, still keeping his back against the bollard, but shifted around so he could see Mason more easily.
‘Good, that’s good.’
Lundmark nodded. He didn’t know what to say, so he said, ‘Thanks.’
There was a pause.
Mason stuck his hands in his pockets and said, ‘Hey, you want gum?’
‘I got some.’
‘You want more? What have I got here? Peppermint. I hate peppermint. You like it?’
‘Sure.’ Lundmark took the gum. He still had half a sandwich to finish, so he laid the gum beside him on the hot concrete. ‘I’ll have it after. Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’ Mason wiped his head and put his hat back on. ‘You take care, right? Any problems, you come tell me.’
‘Sure. Thank you, sir.’
Mason nodded. Lundmark twizzled around again, his back to Mason, staring out over the dirty green water. He was a strange guy Mason, Brad thought. He was a murderer, of course, but a nice guy too. In the world where Brad had grown up, morality had tended to come in simpler colours. He’d never imagined that a hoodlum like Mason could also be a pleasant individual, one to one. He bit into his sandwich, reflectively.
It was at that moment that Mason squeezed the trigger.
The shot cracked out, but the kid never heard it. The bullet, speeding ahead of its own detonation, entered the back of his head dead centre, just above the furthest outward bulge of the skull. The bullet did what it had to do and moved on, exiting Brad’s forehead in a bloody mess. The boy – or rather the corpse which had so recently been a boy, still holding its sandwich – toppled face forwards into the greasy water. The water made a brief glooping sound, then closed over the site.
The only sign that there had ever been anyone sitting on the quayside was the packet of gum lying by the bollard in the sweltering sun. Mason didn’t have the heart to pick it up.
It had been Haggerty McBride who had used the word
if
, but it was still Jim Bosse who answered, albeit indirectly. He tapped the pile of documents.
‘These documents. They detail a business enterprise on a major scale. Revenues are vastly in excess of costs. The payroll alone provides grounds for prosecution. We have no records of anyone in Marion filing a tax return. The documents you have collected are, in our opinion, sufficient evidence of systematic tax evasion – not to mention numerous other counts if we can get them to stick. On the basis of this evidence, I have no doubt we would obtain a large number of convictions.’