Authors: Harry Bingham
‘Yes, and I was asking when.’
‘Mr Carpenter, sir, I have a source inside probably the largest criminal organisation in America. In scale, reach, effectiveness and financial muscle, this organisation will dwarf any group ever brought to justice in the courts of this country. My principal source is a man of exceptional resource and total integrity. We’ll get the documents.’
‘What documents? What do we need?’
McBride paused before answering. From the outset, this investigation had been need-to-know only. That had included McBride and Bosse. It had not included Carpenter.
‘At present, sir, we have enough evidence to move against one unit of the organisation, but only one. If we do things right, I think we could smash it completely.’
‘Yes, yes, I know. You already told me that part.’
‘What we’re currently seeking are financial documents linking the operating unit to the organisational headquarters.’
‘Financial documents? You think the Mafia runs accounts?’
‘These aren’t the Mafia, sir. And you bet they run accounts.’
‘So that’s what you’re after? Internal accounts?’
‘No sir. I don’t believe those will be available. But money transfers must be. I have asked my source to obtain them. Money transfers between the headquarters and the operating unit. If we get our hands on those, then I’m confident we would obtain a warrant to raid the headquarters.’
‘And if you got your warrant?’
‘I believe we’d hook every single member of the conspiracy.’
‘Hah!’
Carpenter made a noise which could have meant anything, everything or nothing at all. He stared gloomily out at the rain.
‘Tennis is gone to hell.’
‘Sir?’
‘Tennis. I was going to be playing tennis with Senator Paulet this afternoon. Won’t now.’
‘No sir.’
There was silence. The building was a modern one and the trouble with modern buildings with their air-conditioning systems and ducted air was that you couldn’t just throw open the window and listen to the rain. McBride didn’t like that. He was a country boy by origin. Knoxtown, Ohio. Population, 863. He liked knowing that the rain would be good for farmers and he liked just plain listening to the rain. Jim Carpenter didn’t.
‘OK.’
Carpenter shifted his bulk, making it clear he was about to leave.
‘So you don’t have a date?’
‘No sir.’
‘These bank records will either just show up or not. There’s not a lot we can do about it, right?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘You’ve got a strange way of running things, McBride.’
‘This investigation is a little different from most, sir.’
‘Hah! … This operating unit. Where did you say it was based?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve kept every detail of this investigation strictly need-to-know, sir. I haven’t told you where the operating unit is based.’
‘Well, I’m your boss and I need to know. So where is it?’
‘May I ask why you require the information, sir?’
‘Fuck you, McBride.’
Carpenter’s swearword spread out on the silence like a stain. McBride held his face carefully impassive.
‘Of course, you’re welcome to know, sir. I apologise for not filling you in sooner.’
‘Well?’
‘The unit is based in Illinois, sir. Our source lives and works in Chicago.’
‘Chicago, huh?’ Carpenter nodded, scowled, stared out at the rain and glowered at it, as though promising to get his own back some time. ‘Chicago.’ He left the room.
McBride had plenty of work to do. It sat in piles all around him. He had a list of reminders from his secretary and a schedule of meetings as thick as the rain cloud outside. But he didn’t touch his work or his phone or go to any meeting. He just sat at his desk, wondering why in hell’s name he’d just lied to his boss. That and the rain.
He missed listening to the rain.
Willard did what he had to do. He gave instructions for the immediate tightening of security.
Lookouts were doubled, on the road, on the rail line, on the river.
All non-essential documents were burned. Barrow-loads of paper were carted outside, doused in gasoline, burned in braziers, and then the ashes were mashed into powder with a rake.
The warehouse was surrounded with bales of straw and tins of gasoline. In the event of a raid, the straw would be drenched with the fuel, then set on fire. Mason reckoned his lookouts would give him at least ten or fifteen minutes of warning. In less than half that time, the entire warehouse could be set ablaze, leaving nothing for the feds to find except burning timber and molten glass.
And as for the essential documents, the ones that Marion absolutely required for its daily business, Mason built a safe cemented into the wall of his very own villa. The safe was a large one and only Mason and Willard knew the codes. And there was one extra ingredient. At the bottom of the safe there was a can of gasoline and a stick of dynamite. A tiny fuse hung out of the safe door and stuck out into the room like a length of cord. In the event of a raid, Mason himself would go to his safe, put a match to the fuse and walk away.
But on one crucial point, Willard hesitated.
That point was Rockwell. Willard knew that he should have his old commander killed. The Independence storekeeper, the focal point of the town’s resistance, had sent a distress signal to the airman. The airman had responded by faking an engine fire and getting out of Marion. Presumably he’d used his time away to make contact with Hennessey. That and what more besides? The truth was, that in the world Willard now moved in, the facts he knew were easily sufficient for him to issue the necessary orders.
But he hesitated.
He tried to persuade himself that he was concerned about the security of goods coming into Marion. If he had Rockwell killed, he’d have to kill the girl and the mechanic too. That would leave the Marion import route hopelessly exposed to a determined effort by the Coastguard. And on top of that, Willard could argue that it was important to find out precisely what Rockwell had been up to; that there was no proof, after all, that Rockwell had got anywhere at all, or that, if he had, any problem was remotely imminent. But in the end, all those arguments amounted to excuses, not reasons. In his heart, Willard knew he could hardly bear to have Rockwell murdered.
But he didn’t hesitate for long. Just as he was seeking to persuade himself to issue the necessary order, he got a phone call from Marion. It was Bob Mason calling to say that the Hamilton girl had just quit.
‘She quit? Just like that?’
‘Uh-huh. I guess she figured she wasn’t getting anywhere with Rockwell. The guy always seemed kind of stony towards her.’
‘You know where she’s gone?’
‘Off home, I guess. She said something about wanting to take a holiday in Europe, but I guess she’ll want to go visit her folks first.’
Willard got off the phone, with his hand shaking. The Lundmark kid was dead. The storekeeper had fled to Atlanta. And now the Hamilton girl had quit. Did that mean that Rockwell’s plans were beginning to fall apart? Or beginning to come to fruition? He didn’t know and couldn’t guess. But he realised this much: that there was no way he could have Rockwell murdered if the flier had already been beaten into surrender. And if the flier hadn’t yet given up, then presumably somewhere amongst the federal enforcement agencies there were people who knew what Rockwell was hoping to achieve…
Willard thought things through, then strolled along to Powell’s office and requested a meeting. He got it at once. He began by telling Powell what he’d done to improve the security at Marion. The banker listened, goggle-eyed.
‘You did what?’
‘It was time we tightened up. Marion’s gotten to be too important to us.’
‘There something we ought to be scared of?’
‘No, at least nothing specific,’ said Willard, lying easily. ‘We discovered that there was a kid in town doing maintenance work for us, whose father we’d killed a little while back. We dealt with that issue, but it seemed like a good opportunity to get more serious all round.’
Powell laughed softly.
‘What’s funny?’
‘What’s funny? You are, Will, you are. You’ve grown up, you know. The guy who made that movie – what was the title?’
‘Heaven’s Beloved.’
‘Right. That was one hell of a lousy movie. It stunk like a coffin full of dead cats. But you ain’t that guy any more. You know who you’ve become?’
‘No.’
‘Your father’s son. And that’s a compliment. Shit, your own safe full of gasoline and dynamite. Ha! Any case, I guess you weren’t calling round just to cheer me up. What can I do for you?’
‘It’s just… I don’t know. It’s just in case there has been any leak out of Marion, we ought to know about it. I don’t know if we have any way of checking what the feds might be thinking, but if we did, then I reckon it’d be worth finding out.’
Powell chuckled. ‘Maybe. Maybe we do.’
‘You’ll take care of it?’
‘Sure.’
‘Good … good.’ Willard breathed out in relief. His moral problem seemed suddenly simpler. If Rockwell hadn’t spoken to the feds, then Willard could simply replace him with a clear conscience. If Rockwell was transmitting sensitive information to places he shouldn’t, then he’d have to take his chances. Willard stood up to go. ‘Thanks, Powell.’
Willard was about to leave, when the banker raised a hand.
‘Just a minute, Will. We got a rule round here. Any breach of security, any hint of a breach, we get our insurance guys involved. Just to look things over, a sort of double check.’
Willard went cold.
‘I don’t think…’ he began, but Powell wasn’t listening.
‘Like I say, it’s a rule. Have you even met Roeder yet? You’ll like him. Everyone does. How does tomorrow look?’
Tomorrow looked rotten. Willard’s day was filled with meetings, appointments, phone calls, work. But Powell didn’t really mean his question. His question was a nice way of giving an order.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Willard, feeling a rim of ice gathering at the pit of his belly, ‘tomorrow looks fine.’
The new girl seemed OK.
She wore her brown hair very short but, unlike some of the other girls, she didn’t use any kind of make-up, and her clothes – flat brown shoes, dark skirt, dark jacket, white blouse, no jewellery – were not of the husband-catching variety. Her skin, which was very tanned, suggested some kind of farm girl, but her small hands and slim figure suggested the exact opposite. But Mr Rogers, the Deputy Manager at the Savings Bank of Northern Florida in Jacksonville, didn’t, in the end, mind about the girl’s origins. All that mattered was that she was reliable, competent, hard-working and settled.
‘Goodnight, Mr Rogers,’ she said, reaching for her hat.
‘Goodnight, Sarah,’ he told her, rocking back on his heels with his thumbs tucked into the side buckles on his waistcoat. ‘Same time, same place tomorrow. Huh? Ha, ha, ha!’
The girl settled her hat on her head, gave her boss a shy half-smile and walked out into the night. She turned down the block and walked for two hundred paces without stopping or looking back. Then she stopped, put her foot on a fire hydrant, and began to retie a shoelace. Not tie, but retie. The shoelace hadn’t come undone. It hadn’t been loose. She retied it anyway.
And as she did so, she swept her gaze back the way she’d come. There were a handful of people out, but nobody gave her a second look. After finishing with her shoe, she remained watching for a moment, then retraced her steps. Nobody paid her any special attention. Nobody altered their course. Nobody looked at her too long or too little.
She walked another half-mile, then entered a café, bought a cup of coffee, spun it out. When she emerged, there were only a couple of people outside, neither of them ones who’d been there fifteen minutes before. She ducked down a side alley, ran hard to the end, ducked behind some garbage cans and waited. Nobody followed. She was in the clear.
Less cautiously now, Pen moved through the gathering darkness to the waterfront. The beach shone with the new white hotels which the Florida land-boom had thrown up in their scores. Bright lights and big cars gleamed between palm trees and hibiscus bushes.
Pen ignored the hotels and headed down the beach, out of town, towards the sprawling encampment known as Tin Can Field. The tin-canners were northerners who came south for winter, cars loaded with a full winter’s worth of canned goods. Now, in towards the end of February, the place was beginning to empty as people began to head off to their northern spring. A few tin huts, that housed latrines and water pipes, rattled in the thin sea breeze. Those people choosing to stay on into March hung around battered jalopies and threadbare canvas tents.
And Abe. There was Abe.
The airman uncurled himself from the ground underneath a knobbly old palm tree, stubbed out a cigarette, and came smiling over to Pen. They reached each other in the twilight, put their arms around each other and kissed long and passionately. Abe didn’t need to be in the air again until daybreak. Pen – in her capacity as Sarah Torrance the bank teller – didn’t need to be at work until eight forty-five. They had all night together.
I brought a tent,’ said Abe, when his mouth eventually became free. ‘I don’t know why, it seemed safer than a hotel.’
‘I agree.’
‘Should be OK for one night’s sleep, anyhow.’
‘Who said anything about sleeping?’
It was dark enough now, that the sea was one big mass of dark grey. The sky was violet at the edges, deepening to midnight blue above. Holding hands, they walked to Abe’s encampment. He had brought a rudimentary canvas tent, a couple of sleeping rolls and blankets, a Primus stove, a paraffin lamp, food and water. He also had a bottle of French red wine, a
grand cru
, one of the best of the prewar vintages. Abe indicated it with a smile.
‘Present from Mason.’
‘Does he know he’s given it?’
‘Not exactly,’ admitted Abe, who’d stolen it, ‘but he’d have been glad to, that’s the point.’
But they ignored the wine and everything else. They crept inside the tent, closed the flap, and faced each other beneath the cramped canvas walls. They held each other, kissed, then began to undress. He began with her jacket, then the buttons of her shirt. She did the same with his. But it was too slow. They began to tear their own clothes off, then before they were done, they simply fell upon each other. Pen’s tongue burned like something on fire. Abe’s hands were simultaneously strong and soft, urgent and understanding.