His father had spent five and a half million dollars trying to procure the extension of the war. If he could have spent more usefully, then he would have done. But his son, Willard, had been in a front-line combat unit, flying as a pursuit pilot. And of all the bloody and dangerous occupations in a bloody and dangerous war, then perhaps the pursuit pilots had the most bloody and dangerous job of all. To put it bluntly, each day of war increased not insignificantly the chance that Willard wouldn’t survive it. His father had presumably considered the matter, then made his decision.
And as he’d said, the arithmetic had hardly been difficult to perform.
90
Sam Skeddings was quite a guy.
He wore silk shirts in bright colours. He had a rack of neckties to match. He was six foot two and had a handspan that could curl all the way round a fat man’s neck. He wore a gun in a shoulder holster and carried three hundred bucks cash in his hip pocket. If he wanted a girl, he got her. If he opened a bottle of whiskey at the start of an evening, he threw it away empty at the end. If he fired a gun, somebody dropped back dead. That was Sam Skeddings. He was quite a guy and both he and his employer, Robert Mason, knew it.
The first part of his assignment was the regular type of thing. Take a big car up the hill to Independence. Shoot the place up a little, but the storekeeper’s house in particular. The instructions were quite specific. Nobody was to be killed, but the storekeeper had to be badly frightened. So Skeddings did as he was told. He picked a small group of men, then went straight up the hill and shot the place up. They shot out windows, damaged woodwork, entered the store itself and wrecked the place. Then they ended by aiming their Tommy guns high through the shattered windows and blazing away non-stop until their firing pins came clicking down on empty air.
But that wasn’t the strange part of the assignment. The strange part was this.
After the shooting, he had been instructed to go back into town. Not in a big black car with Tommy guns poking out of the windows. But quietly. At noon. On foot. And he’d been asked to find out – figure this – to find out what kind of laundry the storekeeper’s wife had been doing.
‘You want me to look at her smalls?’ he’d asked Mason, outraged.
‘Buster, I need you to count the frills on ’em.’
Skeddings didn’t like that kind of thing. Shooting a guy was man-to-man stuff. It wasn’t always pretty, but what the hell, the way the world had gotten, it was the kind of thing that now and again had to happen. But poking around amidst another guy’s laundry! And a married guy! With daughters! It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right at all. But still, orders were orders, and Skeddings was a guy to do as he was told.
91
Abe had meant what he’d said.
A cold, clear, calm resolution had come over him. He knew precisely what he needed to do and could see instantly the exact sequence of steps required to do it.
He gave his instructions to Pen and Arnie. For the time being, they would need to adhere exactly to their existing routines. They would give Bob Mason no reason for suspicion. Meanwhile, in Washington, Bosse and McBride would be working to get the legal machinery in place for a series of sweeping arrests across Marion. As soon as the taxmen had what they needed, they’d call the Miami airfield with an enquiry about chartering an aircraft. That call would be the signal for the three conspirators – and Hennessey up in Independence – to vanish away. None of them would return home, but hide out somewhere in the country. After four weeks, they would rendezvous with Haggerty McBride and Jim Bosse in Washington.
In the meantime, Abe would carry on working on his plane. He had a friend up in Ohio with a field big enough for airplanes and a well-equipped workshop. He’d go up there with Arnie, push their airplane design as far as they could themselves, then bring in the pros. Within a few months, he hoped he’d have his plane. He’d test it briefly, then he’d make his flight. The Orteig Prize was the brightest treasure in world aviation at the moment. In America, Britain and France, rival teams were already tracing designs and commissioning planes. That the prize would be won within a year or two, Abe had no doubts. The only question was who would win it.
Until then, following his own instructions to the letter, he returned to Marion on flying duty. The volume of booze seemed to be increasing by the week. A freighter-load of booze was entering the river every day or two. Coastguard activity was becoming more intense and persistent. But it wasn’t the workload that bothered him.
The first thing was a grisly scene laid on especially for his benefit down by the quayside. Having landed his plane, it was his normal practice to seek out Mason to check on the latest schedule of freighter arrivals. Enquiring at Mason’s office, he was directed down to the concrete loading quay down behind the warehouse.
He found Mason all right, with four of his men. Two of the men were in a flat-bottomed rowboat hauling something out of the river in a net. The other two men stood on the quay, holding their noses at the stench of rotting river mud. In the net was Brad Lundmark, bloated, drowned and dead. The front of his skull was smashed to a pulp: a bullet wound almost certainly.
‘Hey there, Captain,’ said Mason. ‘You OK? Shame this. Boy fell in the river and drowned. Pity.’
His voice said there was no pity at all. Abe could feel Mason’s eyes hard on his face, scrutinising him for any reaction. Abe looked at the dead boy. Something in the green water had done something to the kid’s hair. Instead of dulling in the filth, the submersion had actually clarified it. The boy’s red hair shone out bright red, like burnished copper. Abe looked at the boy and saw himself. Abe knew now that he wouldn’t abandon his mission until he’d destroyed every single element – head, hand and heart – of the organisation that had done this.
But he showed nothing in his face. His voice was steady as he replied, ‘Really, Mason? Looks to me like somebody shot the kid first. You fellers ought to be more careful with your firearms.’
He shrugged and turned away. Rage refined down to a cold, dark point inside his heart. He felt enclosed in darkness, but this was a darkness that he understood; that satisfied him; that he would follow to the very end.
But that scene by the quayside was only the first of his surprises that day. The second was this. Going out on patrol that afternoon, he took off from the Marion airstrip and curved up and around over Independence, as he always did. He looked down, as he always did. And saw them.
Red sheets.
Blazing in the sunshine like a spillage of blood. Blazing in the sunshine like a second corpse. Abe saw the sheets from high overhead and his face, already grim, turned a shade or two harder still. Lundmark was dead. And now this: Hennessey’s red sheets, the emergency signal agreed long ago in an Atlanta restaurant.
Once again, and stronger than ever before, Abe had the sense of the endgame approaching at somebody else’s pace. In the air, in combat, he’d have been reviewing the air above and behind him. He’d have been checking the blind spots under his nose, beyond his wings. He’d have twisted and turned to check that there was no predator lurking in the eye of the sun. But this wasn’t combat. There was no sky to check, and try as he might, Abe couldn’t guess what was going wrong and why.
But meantime, there was Hennessey’s distress beacon to attend to. Beneath Abe’s instrument panel was a blackhandled lever. The lever was out of sight, unmarked, hard to find. Only two planes in the world possessed such a lever. Abe flew one of them, Pen flew the other. Abe reached for the handle and pulled it. Eight feet forwards of where Abe sat, a sheet of black rubber slid gently over the hottest part of the engine. For twenty seconds nothing happened, then a thin thread of smoke needled sideways from the engine cowling.
First a thread. Then a stream. Then a torrent.
92
Pen stood naked in her apartment, looking out over the beating surf. It was a fine day, but hazy. The ocean never really ended, it just dissolved into the sky. She was just back from Havana; had showered, put a comb through he
r hair, drunk some water.
Later that day, she had an engagement with friends, but she had no appetite for it. She ought to phone and cancel, only she didn’t feel like speaking to anyone. She examined her body in the long wardrobe mirror. She had always been slim, but the experience of daily flying in the DH-4, an emphatically masculine plane, had toughened her, given her more strength in the arms, more squareness in the shoulders. And more wrinkles. She was smooth-skinned, but high altitude flying wears the skin like nothing else. Tiny crows’ feet danced outwards from her eyes. She didn’t mind. She liked them.
She put on some underclothes, thought vaguely about putting on a dress, but couldn’t be bothered. She lay on her bed, kicking her feet in the air and picking from the fruit bowl.
This was the end. McBride and Bosse would use what they had to launch an all-out assault on Marion. The town would be destroyed. Independence could begin to rebuild. The organisation that had run Marion would be annoyed, but would start up all over, someplace else. It would kill more people, burn more property, ruin more livelihoods, smash more lives.
And it was the end in other ways too.
It was the end of Pen’s one and only excursion into a world of discipline, where people got up every morning because they had a job to do, where they saw the same group of workmates each day, where flying was not only a pleasure but a task. Pen supposed that she’d go back to the life she’d had before. She’d know to appreciate the good things it offered. She’d miss some of the things it could never provide. She’d settle down.
Because things had ended in one final way.
She’d given up on Abe. She’d love him, always and for ever, but she knew now that the men she could most easily love were precisely those least likely to tie themselves down. Abe was a flier, an adventurer, a man who had made a lifetime’s habit of leaving things behind, of committing to nothing, of moving on. Loving Abe was as beautiful and foolish as loving the wind. Right now, though Pen felt desolate at the thought of giving up, her head told her that it was time to move on.
But that was for the future. Right now, she felt like doing, saying and feeling nothing. Her eyes slid out to the smoky haze in the far horizon. She lost herself in the blur.
Her trance was interrupted.
Pen’s apartment was a top-floor penthouse, serviced by an elevator whose doors opened directly into the living room. To ride the elevator to the top, you needed a key. Pen had her own key, of course, as did the concierge downstairs. If anyone called for her, the concierge called Pen on the house phone and only let them ride up if she okayed it. Right now, the elevator began to whine. It went past the lower floors. It was coming all the way up.
And Pen still had her key.
And the concierge hadn’t called.
She froze. Her first thought was the obvious one. McBride and Bosse had screwed up. They had promised not to hit Marion until she, Abe and Arnie had made their excuses and melted away. But they must have acted too soon or allowed their information to leak. Inside the elevator would be a couple of Mason’s men, armed, deadly, and looking for her…
Pen stood at her bedroom door, still in her underwear, breathing fast. She had only two thoughts, both of them useless. The first was she wished she were dressed. The second was that Abe would have known what to do. The elevator stopped. There was a thin hiss of hydraulics, then silence. The doors opened automatically, but there was a moment’s delay first. Pen snatched up a patterned Japanese-style housecoat, but hadn’t time to put it on.
The doors clanked open.
From where Pen was standing, she couldn’t see directly into the elevator car, only the doors. For an instant, there was silence. Pen thought, it’s all a mistake, they haven’t sent anybody, I’m going to be OK. Then there was a sound. A man moved, then stepped out. Her throat caught. The man turned.
It was Abe.
But not Abe as she’d seen him before. This was a man so different, he seemed almost a stranger. His face was empty but also murderous, calm but also remorseless. It was a face, she guessed, that only men were capable of – and perhaps only those rare men who, in some part of their being, had always been shaped for combat. Men for whom the kill-or-be-killed nature of warfare came naturally, like a talent for cards, or a perfect singing voice.
His eyes found her straight away, as though he’d always known that she’d be standing half-naked at the bedroom door.
‘They’ve killed Brad,’ he said. ‘They murdered Brad.’
93
Pen felt too many things too quickly to have any hope of sorting them into logical order. But from the jumble, here were some snippets.
One: she wasn’t about to be killed, or not imminently, at any rate.
Two: how come Abe had a key to her elevator?
Three: Brad Lundmark dead! And it was all her fault!
Four: she was pleased to see Abe. For all her confused feelings, he was the man she wanted to be with more than anyone else in the world.
Five: he could see her in her underclothes. She felt naked.
Six: his face was terrifying.
Seven: all right, the kid’s death wasn’t entirely her fault, but she was implicated.
Eight: something must have gone horribly wrong for Abe to be here.
Nine: in a way she was pleased he could see her in her underthings.
Ten: it was good to be alive.
She must have made some kind of sound. She certainly stumbled forwards, half in greeting, half in shock. Abe’s face changed. It became solicitous, worried. Pen found herself being helped into her robe. She sat down. Abe rooted around in the kitchen and came out with a glass of ginger ale from the icebox. She drank it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I shocked you by coming up like that. You must have been worried.’
‘You don’t even have a key.’
‘Arnie copied it once. We should have told you.’
‘Yes, you should.’
‘Are you OK?’
‘I thought’
‘You thought Bob Mason was going to step out of there with a Tommy gun. Yes, I’d probably have thought the same. Sorry. It was dumb of me.’
‘You were meant to be up in Marion. I thought you’d be there for the next couple of days.’
‘I was. I used our emergency lever, faked an engine fire and made a kind of crash-landing in Marion. I pretended to patch up the airplane, but told Mason I’d need to come down here for proper repairs. He believed me, I think.’
She half-smiled. ‘Faking the engine fire. Did it work OK?’
‘Yes. It was fun, actually.’
‘Brad Lundmark. You said…’
‘They killed him. Mason gave me some horseshit story, but he meant me to know it was horseshit. And that’s not all of it.’ Abe went on to tell her about Hennessey’s distress signal. ‘I’ve spoken to him by phone – drugstore to drugstore, of course. He’s fine, his family is fine. They just shot his house to pieces. He thinks it was a warning. I’ve told him to get out. He’s going up to Atlanta with his family.’
‘And what are you going to do?’
Abe smiled. Or at least, he widened the corners of his mouth and showed his teeth. But it wasn’t a smile. A smile is about warmth and friendly feelings. This smile was nothing like that. It was a glimpse of the face that Pen had seen to begin with: the warrior’s face, implacable and dangerous.
‘I’m going to continue,’ he said. ‘McBride was right. I should have known. There’s no use striking down one part of the organisation. It’s all or nothing.’
‘Is that safe?’
Pen, I owed that kid. For reasons I can’t even tell you, I owed him and his mother. The truth is, I don’t really care too much if it’s safe. I just want to smash the bastards. Sorry.’
‘Yes, but…’ Pen was about to tell him that she personally cared very much about her safety, when she suddenly realised that Abe was having another one of his flying solo moments. It wasn’t just the face of a warrior she’d seen bef
ore, it was the face of a man who actually preferred to fight solitary and die solitary. She shook her head, stunned at him.
‘You’re unbelievable. You know that? You’re unbelievable.’
‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘Now, even now, your first impulse is to fight alone. Are you even aware you have friends?’
‘Of course. It’s not that. I know you and Arnie –’
‘Did you know that Arnie and I thought you were wrong? That you should have said yes to McBride in the first place? That we shouldn’t run from a job we haven’t finished?’
Now it was Abe’s turn to look shocked. It was obvious from his face that he had no idea. But Pen wasn’t done. She was sitting down, leaning forwards, crying. But her tears were strange. They fell without effort or pause, more like dry sand than salt water.
‘And you know something else? You’re wrong. About everything you think you are. You’ve spent all your life running and the person you run from, finally, is yourself. You know why you never talk about the war? Why you hardly even keep your medals, let alone remember them or honour them? It’s because those medals tell you something true about yourself and you’re too pig-headed to hear it.’
She looked up at him. Her voice, though quiet, had been perfectly composed. It hadn’t sobbed or choked or halted even once. And yet still those tears fell, falling like sand.
‘You’re not a war hero, you’re simply a hero who came to prominence in wartime. I don’t know why you can’t see that, why you don’t know that. It’s like you spend your whole life with your face turned away from the mirror. You have something remarkable. Hennessey saw that within days of getting to know you. And yet you bury it. You always have. You do now. And I guess you always will. And I’m only sorry because, I saw that thing too. I wanted to see it shine.’
There was a long silence. There seemed nothing to say in the aftermath of such a speech. Abe found a towel in the kitchen and handed it to Pen, who dried her eyes with a couple of dabs. Her face didn’t seem altered by the crying in any way. Her eyes were red, they weren’t puffy, her cheeks weren’t tight and scrunched up.
Glory Boys Page 35
