Glory Boys

by Harry Bingham

  ‘Poor little fellow,’ said Ronson. ‘He’s lost weight.’

  ‘Yes, he was always pale, but he looks shocking now, really.’

  Ronson’s mouth twitched and he shot a glance over at Willard, who was contemplating his feet. A hint of devilry flashed in Ronson’s mouth, but his voice was steady as he said, ‘I shan’t be recommending it.’

  ‘Eh? Shan’t recommend what?’

  ‘That hotel. I mean, the place was a positive prison!’

  Willard looked at his friend. Ronson kept a straight face – then Willard cracked a smile – then Ronson chuckled – then, before they knew it, the two men were doubled up laughing, thumping the dashboard and rocking the heavy car on its tyres. It was their fourth joint visit to Charlie Hughes. Neither man liked going, but by keeping the visit short and by going together and taking a stiff drink before and after, the whole ordeal didn’t seem too bad.

  ‘Appalling service. Those waiters acted more like guards!’

  ‘And the guests! Really, they looked like a bunch of jailbirds.’

  Willard tried something which involved a pun on bars – prison bars and hotel bars – but the joke escaped before he was halfway through. Ronson laughed anyway. They shared a drink from the flask in the Packard’s glove compartment. Willard put his key in the ignition and began to nudge the big car home to Manhattan.

  ‘How’s the lovely Rosalind?’ said Ronson.

  ‘Oh, very well. Yes, very well indeed.’

  Ronson leaned across the car and punched Willard on the arm. ‘Lucky dog.’

  ‘Yes. As a matter of fact…’

  ‘Yes?’

  Oh, nothing. Say, did Charlie Hughes say something about Annie?’

  ‘Oh yes, she comes out every week. Stays as long as she can.’

  ‘Really? Gosh, it’s hard to imagine little Annie going there. The place gives me the chills.’

  ‘And so inconvenient, when you have the Plaza midtown, the Ritz…’

  They chuckled again, but not for long. Willard turned the conversation back to Annie.

  ‘She isn’t… I mean, she can’t be sweet on Hughes can she? That isn’t why…?’

  ‘Oh God, no!’ said Ronson emphatically. ‘No if you ask me, there’s another former employee of the Trade Finance team who has her heart…’

  Ronson leered at Willard, who pretended he was too busy driving to notice. He changed tack.

  ‘You know, I was about to say … do you ever think of settling down?’

  ‘Me?’ asked Ronson. ‘I guess … one day … if Clara Bow ever answers one of my love letters. Why?’ Willard didn’t answer right away, and Ronson leaned across the car again, thumping Willard’s arm, but softly this time. ‘I would if I had a girl like yours.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been thinking… I mean I’m still only twenty-six, but all the same, if a girl is right, she’s right, isn’t she?’

  A bolt of pale winter sunlight fell across Ronson’s face and he held an arm up against the glare. Willard was about to make a left turn across the traffic to the Brooklyn Bridge, when a shop front caught his eye. Ebner’s Flowers – Retail – Wholesale – Export – Trade. Willard made a violent course change, pulling right over to the curb. A frenzy of horns blared in outrage. A truck driver hung out of his cab window in order to roar abuse as he gunned past in a flare of petrol fumes. Willard stopped the Packard and yanked the handbrake on.

  ‘Stay here just a moment, would you?’

  He entered the shop. A Jewish-German shopkeeper approached from a back room smelling of cut green stems and flower pollen.

  ‘Listen,’ said Willard, ‘I’m interested in buying some flowers. Roses, I suppose. Red.’

  ‘Ja. Roses. How many you need?’

  ‘Um… Gosh, I should say about a thousand. No. More. Two or three thousand. How much would that be?’

  The florist managed to control his expression well as he began naming sums. Willard fenced briefly over price, before admitting to himself he didn’t really care. He wanted the thing to be done in style. The cost wasn’t important. They talked dates and quantities and prices and delivery arrangements. Willard surprised himself by his conviction and decisiveness.

  Because Rosalind was the right girl, wasn’t she? Willard felt sure, as sure as he’d ever been. He added another five hundred roses to his order and finalised details with a flourish. Should he tip off one of the magazines, he wondered? Get a photographer to take a ‘surprise’ snap of the happy moment? Perhaps that would be crude. On the other hand, it seemed a shame to go to all the trouble and have no one know about it… He’d think about it, maybe consult Larry.

  ‘Gut,’ said the florist, his carefully managed expression finally breaking out into a widening smile of commercial satisfaction. ‘Hey, you want a sample to take home? No charge.’

  He went into the back of the shop and came out with a cardboard carton, slightly damp, containing a dozen rose stems. The rose heads were perfect: velvety, intense, inviting, fragile. Willard put one to his nose, not for any particular reason, but because that was what people did. The rose smelled of nothing at all. Or rather, it smelled of its surroundings: damp cardboard, greenery, crushed leaves.

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t smell!’

  ‘Ah, no, sir. It is January, remember. These are hothouse roses of course. They don’t smell.’

  ‘They don’t? But they have to!’

  Willard stayed standing in the little florist’s shop, the rose stem still held to his nose, the sunlight bleaching the sidewalk and Packard outside.

  81

  Three days later, Mrs Gibson Hennessey was bringing in her washing when her foot kicked against a small cloth-wrapped parcel, about eight inches by five. The parcel was just lying on the ground and certainly hadn’t been there earlier that morning. It looked for all the world as though it had just dropped from the sky.

  She didn’t like touching these gifts from the heavens. She knew where they came from and why. But though she didn’t like to get involved, she put the parcel under her arm and brought it in with the wash. When Gibson Hennessey opened the package later that evening, he found a short paperback book entitled The Rudiments of Morse Code and a one-word note from Abe: ‘Enjoy!’

  82

  Arnie Hueffer, airplane mechanic and detester of heights, slipped on climbing spikes and swore softly.

  It was twelve minutes past nine in the evening. Ahead of him, forty yards down the dark Havana street, Frank Lambaugh’s villa was lit up. Jazz music from a gramophone sidled out through the shuttered windows. The music was interrupted from time to time by bursts of laughter, mostly female. There was a dark shape on the porch, which could be a guard dog or a human being, but could equally well just be a dark shape.

  Arnie took a broad leather belt from his bag and wrapped it around the telephone pole, through a buckle, then around his waist. He looked up at the metal junction box fifteen feet above his head and swore again. Then he kicked his spikes into the soft wood of the pole and leaned back on the belt. He began to climb.

  He was in Havana because Pen’s engine wouldn’t start. The reason why Pen’s engine wouldn’t start was because she had sabotaged it. And the reason why she had sabotaged it (following Arnie’s own patient instructions on engine sabotage) was because she needed Arnie to be out here, in Havana, climbing a telephone pole.

  He swore and blasphemed his way up. It was nine fifteen.

  At the top of the pole, horizontal pegs driven into the wood gave him a chance to get a proper foothold. He did what he could to secure himself, but continued to swear gently all the same. The grey metal junction box was locked, but was easily forced. The little door swung open to reveal a terminal board containing some seventy or eighty terminals. There was nothing to indicate which terminal belonged to which home.

  Arnie glanced back at the villa. On the front porch where the dark shape was lurking, the tip of a cigarette glowed orange in the darkness. Hell! Arnie winced and glanced up at the sky. He was OK, mayb
e. The moon had run behind a scrap of cloud. Without the help of moonlight, Arnie doubted if a dozy guard would notice a man forty yards away up a telephone pole.

  There was no time to lose. He gathered his breath, then pulled out a pair of headphones from his bag. The headphones were connected to a wire ending in a crocodile clip. Arnie settled the headphones over his ears and, one by one, touched his crocodile clip to the terminals on the board. He listened to each for a second or two, then moved on. Most of the terminals were silent, only a few seemed live. When Arnie picked up voices, they were men’s voices, speaking Spanish, none of them Lambaugh, and certainly not Pen.

  The plan contained no room for error. Pen had promised to ring Lambaugh at nine fifteen on the dot. Though Arnie had never heard Lambaugh’s voice, the pair of them would be speaking in English, a sure-fire sign that he’d found the right line.

  But, after working right through the board, he’d hit nothing. He went back to the first terminal, gripped it with his clip and listened again. Nothing. He moved on to the next and the next.

  With one eye on his work, Arnie watched the man on Lambaugh’s porch throw away his cigarette and get up from his sitting position. Arnie let his fingers fly from terminal to terminal. He connected all of them. Still nothing. He tried again. He covered sixty of the terminals and could feel a rising certainty that the plan had failed. Then he hit it. He clipped the next terminal in line and instantly Pen’s voice rang out loud and clear in the headphones.

  ‘A winch,’ she was saying. ‘Apparently Hueffer can’t fix the engine unless he can lift it.’

  A man’s voice answered, thick with drink and irritation. ‘Christ! Didn’t you know you’d need a winch before? How did you think you were gonna lift the engine?’

  Pen began to answer. Her answer was circuitous, talkative, uninformative, bogus.

  ‘Good girl!’ said Arnie in a low whisper. ‘You tell him.’

  Working at top speed, he wrapped a wire around the Lambaugh terminal, then let the rest of the coil drop to the ground. He closed the junction box and half-skidded, half-fell down the pole.

  He took the loose wire, ran it along to a neighbouring alleyway, where a row of former stables had been colonised by the poor of Havana. There was a smell of sewage, spicy food, the sweet tropical blend of richness and decay. The entrance to the alley was marked by a broad stone arch, half-covered in a crumbling render. Arnie clipped his wire to the top of the arch and let the wire down the other side.

  The difficult part had just been done.

  83

  Rosalind smelled them even before she reached the lake.

  Even though the evening was mild by New York, standards, the park was still locked in winter. But something magical had happened. As she came around the corner towards the ornamental lake at the southern end of Central Park, she saw them: roses, thousands of them, at the peak of their bloom; so many that the little rowboat seemed to glow. Roses twined along the sides of the boat, they sprouted from the stern, they arched up from the bow like a figurehead. She stopped dead in her tracks, her hand over her mouth, her pulse accelerating to a racing beat.

  Beside the little boat stood an elderly boatman, almost comically dressed in the English fashion: pale trousers, striped blazer, straw boater.

  ‘Miss Rosalind,’ he said, in an accent straight from Brooklyn. He held out a hand.

  She wanted to stop. She wanted to drink in the sight. She wanted to smell the roses, to absorb the picture, to bathe in the dwindling January light that crept between the Manhattan skyscrapers. But the fairy tale’s hold was too strong. There was the magical boat, the comical boatman, the roses. Rosalind allowed herself to be wafted on board. She was dressed as Willard had asked, ready for an evening at the opera. She wore a sage-green dress under a pale fur coat, silk stockings, pearls, and a fringed silk shawl. She looked – felt – almost like an accessory to somebody else’s outfit.

  She sat down. Closer to the flowers, the smell and colour was almost overwhelming. The floor and seat of the boat were carpeted with rose petals. There were so many of them that wherever Rosalind put her hand, she felt, not wood, but the softness of flowers. In her dreamy state, it felt as though the boat itself were made of flowers. Only the judder of woodwork and the creak of rowlocks was there to prove otherwise.

  The oars splashed through the water. Unlike its big sister further north, the lake was purely ornamental and though the boatman rowed slowly, even a slow rower couldn’t take long to cross.

  Facing forward, Rosalind craned her head to see what she knew had to be on the other side. To begin with she saw only the dull browns and greens of January. Then she caught a glimpse of a strong black and a clear white behind the shrubs. Then there was a further movement and Willard, in a dinner jacket, stepped out from his hiding place in the bushes. Rosalind was vaguely aware of a handful of evening strollers gawping at the spectacle. Away to the side somewhere, a camera bulb popped and flashed. The boatman eased the boat gently into the bank. At the spot where Rosalind was to step out, the damp earth had been sprinkled with white sand, then showered with rose petals.

  She got out. In the bushes, a gramophone played a Mozart string quartet, her favourite. The boatman had shipped his oars and sat with his face totally impassive, like that rare type of family servant who sees everything and never gossips. Up on the bank, Willard took Rosalind’s gloved hand and sank onto one knee.

  ‘Dearest Rosalind…’

  She’d known what was coming. She’d known from the moment that Willard had asked to meet her here. As soon as she’d seen and smelled the roses, she hadn’t just known, she’d felt overwhelmed by her knowledge. She felt like an actress playing out a script.

  And she said ‘yes’.

  Of course she did. She loved Willard. Loved and admired him. He was a man any woman in the world would be proud to have as a husband. Who else could have arranged something like this? The roses. The evening sun. The lake rippled in gold and crimson.

  And it was only afterwards – after she’d said yes, and they’d kissed, and Willard himself had rowed back across the lake, and after they’d drunk champagne, and eaten oysters and lobster, and phoned their families, and made love not once but twice – that Rosalind even became aware of a tiny drip-drip-drip of disappointment.

  ‘Will?’ she said, addressing her three-quarters asleep fiancé.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Those roses, they smelled so wonderful.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘How did you manage it? Hothouse roses, they hardly ever smell.’

  ‘They didn’t smell. Not a whiff.’

  ‘Not a whiff? But…’

  ‘Had to use perfume. Buckets of the stuff.’

  ‘You used perfume? That was perfume?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  But Willard’s ‘mmm’ didn’t mean anything at all. He’d been mostly asleep to begin with. He was fast asleep now. And Rosalind wasn’t. She was wide awake. Feeling her new diamond ring colossal on her finger. Feeling desolate in the knowledge that she’d been wooed with three thousand perfect roses, not one of which had smelled.

  84

  ‘Gee, it’s hot, isn’t it?’ Mamie plucked at the neckline of her dress where it hung damply over her breasts.

  ‘Eighty-seven in the shade, barometer high, humidity high, wind six knots from the sou-south-east.’

  ‘You must get kind of lonesome in that little office of yours. You OK in there?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You always say that. “Fine.” You ever not fine?’

  ‘Sometimes I guess.’

  Abe reached for the cup of coffee Suky had made for him earlier. Suky believed that coffee grounds were reusable for as long as they continued to colour the water at all. Abe’s cup of coffee was a thin grey, with an oily sheen floating on the top. Neither Mamie nor Suky were the sort of company that Abe enjoyed most, but he liked the break, and the girls too enjoyed their chats with the famous airman. The two girls exchanged glances
. After a little nudging and winking, Suky cleared her throat and began.

  ‘Do you ever… I mean… No, sorry, I shouldn’t ask.’ Suky blushed hard and giggled furiously.

  ‘What? It’s OK to ask.’

  ‘Me and Mamie were wondering if you ever had a girl. I mean… I don’t mean… You know… We were just wondering. That’s all.’

  ‘If you mean, have I ever, then yes. If you mean right now, then no.’

  Something rose and fell in Suky’s throat at that information. It was a fairly simple bet that there was a lot of speculation over Abe’s relationship with Pen Hamilton. But Suky’s blush was pressing even harder now.

  ‘And Miss Hamilton. Is she …? Does she …? I guess… I’ve never heard of a lady wanting to fly airplanes before.’

  ‘There are a few ladies who do fly airplanes these days. Miss Hamilton happens to be exceptionally good at it.’

  Suky was bursting to ask whether Pen had a boyfriend – or better still, a succession of super handsome, fabulously daring, millionaire aviator boyfriends – but Abe’s jaw was clamped shut. It wasn’t something he liked talking about. Heck, these days even the thought of it all made him uncomfortable. He kept silent and the girl went stuttering on until eventually she bottled the question. He finished his coffee and stood up.

  Mamie and Suky were responsible for typing up and filing most of the paperwork that came into Marion. When a freighter unloaded its wares, a scribbled cargo note was hastily initialled and sent up to their office. Their part of things was to type up the note, making two carbons for each original. The original was filed, the two carbons passed on to Mason. Everything was like that. Somewhere down the hall, a book-keeper processed all Marion’s financial transactions into a standard set of accounts. Each week he passed up his most recent book-keeping sheets to Mamie and Suky for typing up. Payroll: the same thing. A clerk somewhere else came up with the weekly who-gets-what list. Mamie and Suky typed and filed.