The Sons of Adam (65 page)

‘Oh, Tomek! Tomaszu, my love.’

Rebecca felt full of respect for her husband. If he decided he was going to help Jews from Germany, he’d do it. He’d fill whole ships with refugees. He’d house them, feed them, help them with their schooling and their job-hunting. He’d do it without vanity or desire for recognition. He’d do it because he wanted to spend his money like that and that was all.

‘What do you say?’ he said. ‘A fund. Call it the Rebecca Calloway Foundation. Something like that. You run it. Start out with a couple of million bucks and see how it goes. If you need more, we got plenty.’

His lips asked one question, but his eyes, roaming all over the soft contours of her body, asked another.

‘I love you,’ she answered, saying ‘yes’ to both.

Alan had told Lottie that he’d think things over in Persia. He’d said to her that he’d use his time away to decide whether to go in search of Tom Creeley-Calloway. When he’d said it, he’d thought the decision might be a tough one. But as things turned out, it was easy.

Horribly easy.

On finding that the concession had been cancelled, his first action had been to sail up the coast to Abadan. Once there, he’d found Anglo-Persian in the same position as Alanto: no concession, no business.

‘What the devil is the Shah playing at?’ said Alan to the Abadan refinery manager.

‘Raising money for his treasury, I expect. Apparently things have been stirred up by some American oilman who came here offering ludicrous amounts in exchange for drilling rights.’

‘Drilling rights? We’ve got the only blasted drilling rights.’

‘Absolutely. Damned Yanks.’

‘Do we know which company was involved?’

‘The company was a Texan outfit, Norgaard, I believe the name was.’

‘And the oilman?’

‘A chap called Calloway. Thomas Calloway.’

That was it.

Done. Finished. Dusted. Over.

Tom had found a new contentment. He’d come to America in search of everything and now, at long last, he’d found it.

Home? He’d come home the day he set foot in Texas. Oil? Norgaard Petroleum was everything he’d ever hoped for and more. Family? He had the best family in the entire world. And even the past felt settled now. Alan and the Montagues had done him great wrongs in the past, but, in overturning Alanto’s concession in Persia, Tom had struck back in a way that seemed to settle the score.

Tom was at peace. If the Montagues never crossed his path again, he’d never again cross theirs. The accumulated bitterness of twenty years seemed washed away and done with for ever.

Alan lost his head.

Tom!

Tom had done this. He’d come to Persia for no reason except to smash the company that Alan had built in his name and memory. He’d done it from anger; from cool, malicious calculation; from some inexplicable desire for destruction. Over the years, Alan had wondered endlessly about the reason for Tom’s long absence. He’d thought of everything. Everything except the one true reason.

Rage.

Even out here, on the burning Persian coast, Alan could feel the storm of Tom’s unreasonable anger. Sixteen years in the making, Tom’s fury was like a whirlwind storming round everything that Alan had spent his life creating.

Something inside Alan hardened and blackened. For the first time in his life, his thoughts turned to revenge.

The boardroom was silent. Twelve faces stared in silence. The Chairman, Egham Dunlop, nodded at his son-in-law, who stood up.

‘You’ve heard the news,’ said Alan, briefly. ‘The Shah has cancelled our concession. We’re not allowed to ship so much as a single barrel of oil out of the country. Though we still have access to oil in Iraq, it’s nowhere near enough to meet our obligations. Within a matter of weeks, our stocks will be exhausted.’ Alan smiled thinly. ‘To put it mildly, gentlemen, our company is on the brink of disaster.’

Silence.

What was there to say, after all? Alanto’s offices stood in a quiet street near St James’s Park. The day was a foggy one, the sort that only London could produce: green and choking, harsh with the sting and smell of coal-smoke. Outside the boardroom windows, the leafless plane trees were hardly visible through the murk.

Then Dunlop spoke. ‘We’ll take it back, I suppose?’

Alan looked surprised. ‘I beg your pardon, Chairman?’

‘Take it back.’ Dunlop tapped the map of Persia that hung on the wall. ‘Give the Shah a whiff of gunpowder. Knock some sense into him.’

‘I’m not sure that would be altogether …’

‘We could send in a few Tommies. Land ’em here.’ He tapped the map. ‘March ’em here. Either sort out the Shah or put in one of our own chaps. Don’t see why not. Who’s going to stop us?’

‘The Persian army, perhaps.’

‘The Persian army! Phoo!’

‘It has a hundred thousand men and Western armaments,’ pursued Alan. ‘Besides, I’m not sure –’

‘A hundred thousand men, eh? Yes, but have they ever seen a De Havilland bomber in action? Have they ever tasted –’

‘Perhaps the Managing Director would explain to us what he has in mind?’ said one of the other directors hurriedly, in an attempt to ease Dunlop away from his ever more bloodthirsty schemes.

‘Thank you,’ said Alan. ‘First things first. We need to get our concession back. We’ll make the moral case forcefully, of course. The Shah’s acting illegally and he knows it. On the other hand, we need to be realistic. He’s the king and it’s his country. He can do as he pleases. We’ll have to pay more than we’re paying now. A lot more. But we need the oil. It’s as simple as that.’

There was general agreement. Even Dunlop’s warlike muttering died down to little more than a background hum.

‘You’ll go to Tehran, I suppose?’ asked one of the directors. ‘How long do you think … ?’

But Alan was shaking his head. ‘No. We’ll send one of our best men.’

‘But the negotiations? Shouldn’t
you
handle them?’

Alan’s thin smile reappeared. It wasn’t warm inside the boardroom, but there was a thin glaze of sweat on his forehead, as though the pea-souper fog outside had crept in and settled.

‘Hear me out. I said the first thing was to get the concession back, but we need to face facts. And the fact is that these countries are unstable. Persia has just proved it this year. Iraq may do the same next year. In my opinion, the long-term security of our business is at stake. Does anyone present disagree?’

Alan gazed round the room. A few of the directors shook their heads. Nobody spoke.

‘Good.’ Alan nodded. ‘Then there’s only one place to invest. A place of abundant oil, abundant freedom, known stability: America.’

Again he paused, looking for doubters. There wasn’t so much as a ripple of hesitation. Alan smiled to himself. Tom wanted a fight, did he? Tom was keen for a scrap, was he? Well, Alan had no intention of disappointing his twin.

‘Happy fortieth birthday … Jesus Christ!’

Bard, now in his late fifties, was still a strong man. But the suitcase that came thundering down onto Tom’s desk was so heavy it virtually split the rolltop.

‘You’re gonna be lifting the next one, pal.’

Tom grinned. His birthday gift was hardly a surprise, but it was a damned nice one all the same. He released the catch on the suitcase and wrenched it open. Inside lay a half-dozen drill bits, each one battered and worn, and each one labelled: ‘Gator Bay No. 1’, ‘Arthur Roland No. 2’, and so on.

Tom’s grin widened.

As the price of oil had settled back down, so Tom had begun to drill again. Bard’s gift was a collection of the drill bits that had struck oil from the last eight months of Norgaard’s drilling. They’d join the other bits that already decorated the walls of Tom’s office. Tom’s contentment was growing by the month.

And it was growing, even though one of the main outcomes of his actions in Persia had been to bring Alanto Oil right onto his own doorstep. Alanto had invested in a company named Blackwater Oil, based right here in Texas. In the past, the move would have sent Tom crazy. But not now. Tom was at peace. He knew he’d caused Alanto a problem. If Alanto took the obvious steps to fix it, then Tom was hardly in a position to object. If he’d been in Alan’s shoes, he’d have done the exact same thing.

He got up and strolled to the window. Over the road, he could see a Blackwater service station selling gas. Even that sight didn’t bother him now.

‘Life’s pretty good, eh, Lyman?’ he said.

‘Not bad. Could be worse. Yeah, I reckon.’

The two men stared out of the window. Out on the Blackwater forecourt, a white-shirted man was struggling to fix a big red sign in place by the roadside.

‘Doing anything tonight?’ asked Bard.

‘No. Just going home.’

‘Well, there’s worse places, I guess.’

Tom nodded.

The guy out on the forecourt got his sign in place and stood back, sweating but happy. Tom’s gaze suddenly sharpened.

‘Is that … ?’ he said. His voice was tense.

Bard came closer. He too stiffened. ‘No! They couldn’t …’

The sign hadn’t been properly secured and it swung sluggishly in the hot, thin air. One of the flaps brought the sign into closer view.

‘What in the name of shit … ?’

‘Jesus Christ! Does that say … ?’

The sign flapped again and its message was unmistakable: huge red letters glaring on a white background. The sign said:

GAS
only
15c.!!

‘Fifteen cents!’ said Bard. ‘Have they gone crazy?
Fifteen
cents?!’

For a moment Tom continued to stare. His knuckles were white and there was a look on his face that Bard had never seen before.

‘Go check this out, willya?’ said Tom.

That was all. He meant: go and find out if it’s just this one garage, or the whole chain of them.

But he already knew the answer. It would be the whole damn lot of them. Alan had discovered his twin’s identity and here was the proof. The Blackwater sign wasn’t a coincidence, it wasn’t a mistake. It was a fortieth birthday card addressed to Tom and signed by Alan.

And that was when Tom knew it. That the past wasn’t over. That the past would never be over. And that whatever might have happened in the past was nothing,
nothing
compared with what was yet to come.

Shortage of petrol! It’s enough to make one weep.

General Erwin Rommel, Commander of the
German Afrika Korps, during the retreat from
El Alamein, November 1942.

The thirties had started badly, but they were ending worse.

In China: war. In Russia: tyranny. In Germany: the seeds of disaster, still unripe but growing all the time.

Just one generation after the Great War, another war loomed. It was a hard time to be optimistic, and few people were.

It was summer 1939.

For oilmen, the thirties had been OK. Not great, but good enough. The glut of oil from the East Texan boom hadn’t exactly dried up, but somehow the system had adapted. Auto makers still built cars. People still drove ’em. They still needed gas.