Glory Boys

by Harry Bingham

  ‘Thornton? Hi, I’m Bob Mason. Welcome to Marion.’

  68

  From the moment of Abe’s last meeting with Haggerty McBride, he had entered into a kind of daze. He ate, flew, washed and slept just as though things were normal, but they weren’t. It was as though something inside had been cut off, as though his own connection to himself had been severed.

  The feeling wasn’t unfamiliar. Years back, in France, as a junior lieutenant pilot under another man’s command, he’d had the exact same feeling. A day might be sunny and warm. The men might be loafing around the airfield, bare-chested, goofing around with a baseball. And then everyone would be called together to be briefed on their next mission. The briefing would be short, clear, unemotional. And it would quite likely kill one of the young men who stood to listen. Then the lecture would finish. The men would go back to whatever they’d been doing before, throwing a ball or fussing over an engine problem. And Abe could never do that. The upcoming mission filled his thoughts. He unrolled every mile of the ground he was about to cover, envisaging it as it would drop away beneath his nose cone. He foresaw and played out every scenario of attack, defence, weather, mechanical complication and wind. And meantime, he felt numb, as though his feelings were hidden away in some locked compartment in a far-off place.

  And it was like that now.

  If he could, Abe would have wished away the chain of decisions that had brought him to this moment. But he wasn’t much given over to thinking about the past and he didn’t spend a lot of time regretting things that were done and irrecoverable. And as he saw it the future was becoming ever clearer.

  He’d committed himself, like it or not, to a project. He couldn’t now quit until that project was done. Jim Bosse had asked for some of Marion’s most secret documents. Brad Lundmark’s enterprise had brought those documents within reach. But Abe knew that he could never ask Brad himself to take them. Nor Pen. Nor Hennessey. Nor Arnie. Abe knew with a kind of dark foreboding that taking the documents was his job and his alone.

  So he got ready.

  He called Bosse in Washington, explained what he needed and why he needed it. On one of the days when it was his turn to carry the mail, he walked into Havana and bought himself a Colt revolver, with plenty of ammunition. Sending Arnie away for a couple of days on a pretext, he used the workshop to make castings from Brad Lundmark’s lemon icing. Because the icing wasn’t an exact guide to size, he made several copies of each key, filing each one differently so he had plenty to choose from.

  And that was it. He waited for the day, then acted. During a pre-flight check, he sabotaged one of his cylinders, so that it burst during flight. The accident wasn’t instantly dangerous, but it forced an immediate landing and repair. Abe had a spare cylinder in Marion, but only a defective one. He told Mason, truthfully, that it would take him hours to fix it. Mason told him to get on with it as fast as possible, as there would be a freighter due early the following day.

  And that was that.

  Abe was committed to a course of action that might leave him victorious or might leave him dead. But the strangest thing was still this: that he felt nothing. He felt almost nothing at all.

  69

  He’d done it. Why not? He’d taken the deal, taken the money, taken the good things that were on offer. ‘Are you in or are you out?’ What a question! Willard had been genuinely surprised they’d felt the need to ask.

  ‘In or out? Gosh! In, of course, in.’

  His father had been powerfully moved.

  ‘Good boy, Willard! Good boy!’

  He’d leaped from his seat and gripped Willard’s hand so tightly that the two locked hands went completely white, with spots of red burning at the knuckles. Willard had seen his father’s face as he’d never seen it before: tears swimming in his eyes, emotion trembling in his lips.

  ‘By God, son, I’m proud of you. The old Firm will be in good hands for a while yet.’ He struck Ted Powell on the shoulder. ‘This old dog never had any kids.’ He punched himself on the chest. ‘And this old dog tried hard enough, but only managed one son from five attempts. There have been times when I’ve doubted you, but I shouldn’t have done. I made things tougher for you than Ted would have done if it had been just down to him. I don’t think I could have stood it, if you’d flunked. But you didn’t. Brains and guts and persistence. You’ve done the family proud.’

  And when he looked back on his decision, Willard realised that it hadn’t been the money that had swayed him. Not the money, not the yachts, not the houses, not the job. It had been simply this: his father. For the first time in his life, Willard had felt the full rush of his father’s approval. The feeling was intoxicating. It was better than wine, better than money, better than Rosalind.

  Powell too had been generous with his congratulations. ‘Take a holiday. You’ve earned it. What’s the name of that girl of yours? Rosalind? Take her somewhere nice. Instead of freezing your ass off up here, why not head down to the sun? Go to Florida, fish a little, swim a little, eat plenty, get some sun, hit the casinos down there. I can give you some names.’

  ‘Don’t hit the casinos too hard, though.’ Willard’s father spoke like the protective parent, then immediately regretted it. ‘Hell, Will, hit ’em hard as you like. If you lose money, come to me. I don’t want you to feel short. The Firm will be happy to stand you a good time. What’s that place you stay at, Ted? The Royal Poinciana? That’s all right, is it? Comfortable? Take yourself a suite there, Willard. A nice one. Just let me know what it costs. I’ll take care of it.’

  It was only after a while (and two more bottles of the Muscadet), that Willard realised he still had a problem.

  ‘Gosh, though,’ he admitted, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to say to Ros. She’s awfully hot on this whole Arthur Martin business. I don’t know what she’d say if she thought I’d just turned chicken at the last moment.’

  Powell had a cigar in his hands and began the whole business of lighting up. ‘Girl trouble, huh? How many times have I heard that?’

  Junius Thornton raised a finger in warning. ‘You understand that under no circumstances do you tell anybody what you know about the Firm. Womenfolk most certainly included.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Powell got the cigar going and spent a few seconds imitating a Detroit factory chimney. ‘We’ll fix things, don’t worry.’

  ‘Yes, but how? What shall I tell her?’

  Powell shrugged. ‘Tell her you found out the bad guys. Say there were some folks at the bank who were up to no good. Taking money from the mob. Involved in the rackets. Something like that. We’d prefer it if you didn’t mention alcohol as such, but if you must, you must. Let her ask a few questions, give her a few answers. Then clam up. Say there’s a police investigation. You’ve been told not to talk. The details will emerge in due course.’

  ‘It’ll be a bit difficult if there’s nothing at all to show for it. I mean, wouldn’t the cops want to make a few arrests, that sort of thing?’

  ‘Good point. We’ll fire a couple of people, have the police pick ’em up for something. That man McVeigh is a pain in the ass. We could lose him, no problem. I can think of some others we could toss out, at that. And we pay the City cops plenty. They’ll be happy to help. We’ll make sure it makes the papers. Nothing too big, of course, but a few column inches in the Times. That should keep her thinking you’re the big hero.’

  Willard gulped. The briskness with which Powell dealt with wrongful arrest, police corruption and the sundry details of running a large criminal organisation still came as a shock.

  ‘Good idea. OK. I’ll tell her. She’ll be pleased, really.’

  Pleased? She had been ecstatic, adoring. Before he’d left for Canada, Rosalind had loved Willard but – as they’d both secretly known – she’d always held something back. Something in their relationship had always been slightly reserved, provisional. That changed.

  Willard had played his part to perfection. From Mo
ntana he sent Rosalind a telegram stating simply, ‘GREAT NEWS AM SAFE TELL ALL ON RETURN’. He hadn’t hurried back. The two founders of Powell Lambert wanted to use their time in the north to meet some of their major clients, Chicago-based mostly, but others from Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh as well. Willard tagged along, keen to learn the business from the men who had built it. Five days later, he was back in New York. ‘Oh, Willard!’

  Rosalind had pressed herself into his arms like one of Willard’s movie heroines after Willard had snatched her from the clocktower, untied her from the railway track, or used his plane to fight off twelve carloads of highly armed bad guys. She’d swallowed the story. Why wouldn’t she? Willard could point to the men that had been fired, the arrests that had been made, the letters of thanks from the Chief of Police, from Ted Powell himself. And the thing that had only ever been provisional between them vanished.

  Rosalind was – not in a crude way, but definitely nevertheless – waiting for Willard to ask her to marry him. If he had done, she’d have said yes. Not just yes, but yes definitely, yes blissfully.

  70

  The heat of the day was decaying into long green and brown shadows. Up on the roof of the world, the sun was ribboning the sky with twenty-mile streamers of rose and white. It wasn’t hot, but Abe felt stifled. The air in his lungs felt as thick and unrefreshing as boiled seawater. But that was a physical feeling, not a feeling-feeling. He still felt cut off from himself, still determined to do what he was about to do. He worked slowly, clearing the wreckage of the damaged cylinder from his engine, checking carefully for any lodged shards of metal which could come loose and cause havoc.

  Then he heard it: an aero engine’s beat, when the sky should have been clear. He heard it, then saw it: the DH-4 shouldering up against the wind, ducking through the belt of turbulence at the end of the airstrip, then that awkward-beautiful side-slip landing. The big plane shook its speed off into the coarse-bladed grass, then fish-tailed over to Abe. He watched it come, grim-faced and unwelcoming. Pen cut the engine, then swung herself out of the cockpit, smiling.

  ‘Hey there, Cap’n,’ she said, offering a mock-salute.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Mason called. Said you had an engine problem.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘A cylinder? Is that right? Something about a cylinder?’ Pen’s voice floated off uncertainly, not quite sure whether planes had cylinders or not.

  ‘Yep. One busted over the ocean. Had to come in.’

  ‘You told him you had a spare, only there was some kind of problem with it.’

  ‘Right. Inside of the cylinder wasn’t milled right. Problems with the piston-head.’

  ‘The piston-head, huh?’ Pen backed quickly away from the technicalities. ‘Anyway, he was anxious to get things moving. Arnie thought it might save time if I brought you up a spare.’

  She pulled a cylinder from her jacket, shining dull gold in the dying light. Abe felt a spasm of annoyance. Little as he liked what he had committed himself to doing, he’d sooner go ahead on his timetable and without interference.

  ‘Let’s see,’ he said rudely.

  Pen gave him the cylinder. Abe stumbled slightly as he took it, then stood up. During his stumble, he switched the two cylinders, substituting the bad one for the good, keeping the good one concealed in the fold of his jacket. He pretended to examine Pen’s cylinder, then said with annoyance, ‘Tsk … now that’s not like Arnie.’

  ‘There’s a problem?’

  ‘This cylinder has the same problem. Here, feel.’

  He passed her the metal tube and she felt silently for the flaw. She couldn’t find it at first, then could.

  ‘Gosh! Yes, I see.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. We can file it. It takes time, but it’s not hard. If you like, I’ll show you how. You can do it.’

  He didn’t wait for an answer, just turned on his heel and entered the tool shed, where he switched on the single fly-speckled bulb. He looked around, expecting Pen to follow, but found her hanging just outside the doorway, staring in. Her face, usually so composed, had become complex, like a puzzle that was beyond Abe to decipher.

  ‘Pen?’

  ‘You want me to file it? Me?’

  ‘Sure. Why not?’

  ‘And Arnie gave me a dud cylinder? One with, I don’t know, a bad piston-mill, or whatever you said.’

  ‘A milling problem on the inside surface. It does happen, you know.’

  ‘Right. One cylinder bursts in flight. You’ve got a spare, but it’s dud. Arnie gives me one to bring up to you, only it’s busted too. That’s some bad cylinders we’ve got.’

  Abe shrugged. There was something rough and ragged in Pen’s face and voice; he wasn’t sure what. His own emotions had turned into a swirl. He tried to look inside himself to see what was going on, but everything seemed opaque, tobacco-coloured, hidden.

  Pen stepped suddenly into the hut and reached down to Abe’s jacket. She felt the hard smooth bulge of metal. Abe’s stumble – a misdirection – one card trick too many. There was a moment’s strained and unbearable silence. Then she said, ‘How about we use the perfectly good cylinder you’ve got right there?’

  Abe stuttered for a second. He didn’t like being out of control of things, but didn’t seem in control of anything just at the moment, not even himself.

  ‘Just a moment,’ he said hoarsely.

  He walked out, twenty or thirty feet away, and took a leak. He came back around the hut the other way. Then he went to Pen’s plane and started the motor at low revs. The beat of the engine blotted out all other sounds. He came back. ‘I don’t see anyone, but we’ll still talk low.’

  She nodded.

  ‘How did you know?’ he asked.

  ‘Everything. Too many bad cylinders. Working after dark. Everything.’

  ‘I didn’t want you to know.’

  ‘Know what?’

  The muscles in Abe’s jaw knotted and unknotted. He wanted to say and didn’t want to. He didn’t know what he wanted. But he put his hand beneath the worktop and, from some unseen compartment, drew out a handful of dark metal shapes. The shapes were keys.

  ‘Brad got a hold of some keys to an office. He thinks the office is the one where the papers we need are kept. These are copies of the keys.’ He put his hand into the tray of keys and let them run, chinking dully, through his fingers. The warm metal and the noise of the keys as they fell was the most real thing in Abe’s world right now.

  Pen stared at the keys, her face puckering in something close to dislike.

  ‘So that’s it,’ she said bitterly. ‘We try to work together up until this point, then that’s it. Brad gets you the keys and you don’t even tell me you’ve got them. I guess you’ve got some dumb-ass plan to break in and get the documents. How are you going to get them copied, authenticated and returned tonight?’

  ‘Bosse. He’s up the creek in a rubber boat. He’ll come down at one a.m. We’ll go upriver until we’re far enough from Marion, then copy the documents, sign off on ’em, then he’ll bring me back.’

  ‘And if you’re caught?’

  Abe shrugged. If he were caught, he would be killed. He had a gun in his pocket, but he’d been an airman, not an infantryman. He wasn’t a skilled shot and he’d be heavily outgunned on ground that wasn’t his own. If he were killed, he hoped that Mason would do it quickly and cleanly, but worried that the Marion way might involve a good measure more brutality. Aside from that, he wasn’t sure he felt anything much apart from the dull heaviness that had been filling him.

  ‘I meant what about me? What about Arnie?’

  ‘Bosse has sent McBride to fetch you both away tonight. Obviously now you’ll have to go with Bosse by boat. Sorry about that.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Pen’s mouth fell open with contempt and disbelief. ‘You’re still going to go ahead? You’re unbelievable! Jesus Christ, if I’d only known…’

  Pen’s extremely uncharacteristic blasphemy took Abe aback.
Even in his dullness, the shock of the expression woke him up.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I go ahead? I don’t…’

  Pen came fully into the light now, her voice scathing and her face disgusted. ‘Listen. You know how I knew what you were up to? The real answer? It wasn’t the light or Arnie screwing up. It was you. That you wanted me to file the cylinder. That you gave me a job to do.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Pen was hissing her words now, quietly but with a furious intensity. ‘You know why I joined this venture? To be a part of something. I didn’t want to be just a girl with a hobby, I wanted to be an aviator with a job. This job seemed like a good one. But I was wrong. You haven’t included me since I started. You think you have but you haven’t.’

  Abe’s face was grey in the dim yellow light. The corners of his mouth had a downward slant, a grim tightness. He felt assaulted by Pen’s anger, but there were other feelings too, lost in the dark-brown swirl of his mind. He said, ‘You wanted to help with the mail route and you fly it almost on your own. You fly the ocean. You watch the freighters. You collect information like the rest of us. That’s including you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Right. That’s what you tell yourself. That’s why you think you’ve done what you need to do.’

  ‘Yes. I think I have.’ His voice abbreviated and tightened. He sounded like a military officer handing out orders. Perhaps it was that which prompted Pen to switch tack abruptly – or appear to switch tack, anyway.

  ‘I’m not in the army. You are not my commander. This is not the war,’ she said.

  ‘It is a kind of war.’ Abe leaped up from his stool, found the shed too small to go anywhere and sat back down again.

  ‘It isn’t! In the war, your men weren’t free to choose. They were there to fight or be shot for desertion. I’m here because I choose to be. I know the risks.’