Glory Boys

by Harry Bingham

  DATE, ACTUAL

  27 FEB, 1926

  DATE, EFFECTIVE

  27 FEB, 1926

  RECEIVING BANK

  FIRST NATL N FLORIDA, JACKS, FL

  ATTN:

  MRROGERS

  CLIENT ACCOUNT

  COSIMO REALTY (FLORIDA) INC

  ACC NUMBER

  44500745

  SENDING BANK

  GT LAKES GUARANTY, CHICAGO, IL

  RESP

  MRPHELPS

  CLIENT ACCOUNT

  MRGKBARROW

  ACC NUMBER

  67701011

  AMOUNT

  DOLLARS 1320 CENTS 00

  AMOUNT WORDS

  DOLLARS ONE THOUSAND

  THREE HUNDRED TWENTY

  CENTS NIL

  TRANSACTION REF

  BARROW

  CLIENT REF

  NONE

  CONFIRMATION

  PHELPS TGR IMD

  ‘Confirmation?’ queried Abe.

  ‘We need to confirm the money transfers once we’ve executed it. That one means we need to contact Phelps by telegraph, on an immediate basis. They’re all immediate.’

  ‘And these references at the bottom?’

  ‘Most transactions are just referenced by the name of the person sending the money. If the client wants to add any reference of their own they can. Most don’t.’

  Abe flipped through the next two or three sheets, all of which contained the same kind of information in the same layout.

  ‘This is perfect.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Why? You sound unsure.’ He gazed up at her sharply. Dark shadows threw a jagged patchwork across her face.

  ‘I … It’s…’

  Abe stared back at the sheets. Haggerty McBride had told them that he wanted documentary evidence of substantial bank transfers between Marion and its headquarters.

  ‘This is it, Pen. This is exactly what McBride asked for.’

  ‘I know. But the amounts. The amounts don’t make sense.’

  Abe frowned and looked back at the sheets. Most of the transactions were small – a thousand bucks or less – but of course most of the transfers coming into the bank would have nothing to do with Marion. He flipped through the sheets. There were some larger transactions – five, seven, even ten thousand bucks – but nothing huge. He reached the end and looked up.

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ said Pen softly, ‘but you’re bringing in at least three shiploads of booze a week. Each shipload – what? – thirty or forty thousand bucks.’

  ‘Yes. At least that.’

  ‘And according to Mason, the money is transferred to Cuba the moment the cargo is checked.’

  ‘Sure. He makes a point of it.’

  ‘And there’s nothing. Nothing like that. We’ve handled one single transfer for twenty thousand bucks. Aside from that, nothing over ten. Hardly anything over five.’

  Abe said nothing, but his eyes connected with Pen’s. They both understood the same thing, both felt the same way. Over the last few months, they’d burrowed deeper and deeper into the heart of the enemy defences. And now they were in the inner sanctum. The holy of holies. The place that McBride himself had named as the key to a successful prosecution. And it looked as though McBride had been wrong. It looked as though they’d dug their way through to an empty vault, a strongroom with nothing inside.

  ‘Someone has to be paying for that booze.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And the money arrives in Cuba. It arrives from this bank, this branch. It has to come from somewhere.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’re sure you see all the transfers? If we were missing some, then…’

  ‘I see them all. I’m certain. There’s only one telegraph terminal inside the bank. I sit next to it, for God’s sake.’

  ‘The mail?’

  ‘That comes to me too. I’d know if there was anything else, I swear it.’

  ‘Then it has to be here. It has to be.’

  Pen didn’t say anything, didn’t even shrug. Abe turned back to the papers, the flimsy little stack that riffled slightly in the sea breeze. Abe had a sudden strong sense that the answer was in his hands right now. He read each sheet, one by one, searching for the clue that would give them what they needed.

  But Pen was right, or seemed to be. Although, in total, there was plenty of money being transferred into Jacksonville, the individual amounts were too small to account for the quantity of alcohol which Abe knew was coming in. He checked the client names and locations. They were all different. The banks responsible for making the transfers seemed to come from all over the place too. Only one name cropped up more than once. ‘Powell Lambert, NY, NY’ came up again and again, on transaction after transaction. Abe pointed it out to Pen, who said she’d raised the same thing with her boss. ‘According to Rogers, Powell Lambert is a big Wall Street outfit. It does a lot of trade finance, apparently. We’re the Powell Lambert correspondent for the south-east.’

  Abe nodded. He was no money man. He’d long worried he might run into a problem he simply didn’t have the expertise to understand. But he looked back at the sheets and then he saw it.

  He saw it and, without for the moment being able to explain anything, he knew that he had what they’d been searching for. On one of the Powell Lambert transactions, Abe read:

  SENDING BANK

  POWELL LAMBERT, NY, NY

  RESP

  MRWTTHORNTON

  Was that Mr W. T. Thornton as in Willard T. Thornton? Willard Thornton, whom Abe had nursed through his flying infancy? The same man, whom Abe had seen develop into one of the better pilots in America’s finest aviation unit? The odds seemed stacked against it, Thornton was a common enough name after all … and yet Abe remembered the note that Willard had sent via Brad Lundmark. He remembered Willard’s words. ‘I’ve decided to chuck the film business – a dumb game really – and make a new start on Wall Street. Trade Finance, would you believe it!’

  Trade Finance.

  Willard Thornton on Wall Street.

  An ocean of alcohol pouring through Marion from Cuba – and a torrent of money which had to be flowing the other way. Had to be. And what was trade finance, after all? It was being the middleman. Perhaps the point wasn’t that each ship brought in thirty or forty thousand bucks’ worth of booze. Perhaps the point was that on each ship there were consignments for five, ten, maybe twenty different customers across the US. If each customer-consignment was paid for separately, then Pen’s tear sheets were accurately capturing exactly how the business operated. In a flash Abe saw the business, the way the business actually operated. Booze pouring in from all over. Customers buying from all over. And money, torrents of money, pouring through the system, controlled and manipulated from Powell Lambert’s Wall Street base.

  Abe looked up and caught Pen’s eye.

  ‘You look shocked,’ she said. ‘Have you…?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘I think I have.’

  105

  Paulet went home and made a local phone call to a Washington number. The person he spoke to listened, asked a couple of questions, then thanked Paulet and replaced the receiver. That person then went ahead and placed a long-distance phone call direct to Ted Powell. Ted Powell listened too, asked a couple of questions, then hung up. Although it was getting late, Powell dialled Dorcan Roeder’s extension, and told him to come straight up.

  Less than a minute later, the insurance man stood in Powell’s office.

  ‘Chicago,’ Powell said without introduction. ‘Not Marion at all.’

  ‘Chicago?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘Paulet. Who had it direct from Carpenter.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Today. Just now. An hour ago.’

  Roeder frowned. His fingernails were pretty much chewed down to the bone, but that didn’t stop him gnawing at them anyway. He thought for a moment, chewed his nails. Powell watch
ed.

  ‘That make sense to you? How’s things up there?’

  Roeder looked up. ‘Chicago? Good. It’s not one of our weak spots.’

  ‘You think.’

  ‘I think, yeah.’

  ‘Maybe this whole Marion thing is a red herring.’

  Roeder shook his head. ‘No. It doesn’t smell right. Any case, we’ve got new pilots hired. Training’s going fine. We’re almost ready to make the change.’

  ‘You’ve got the girl?’

  Roeder shook his head. ‘No. Soon.’

  ‘Maybe we ought to move some men to Chicago. Tighten up.’

  Roeder thought some more. His fingernails took a battering. Then he decided something.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? What no?’

  ‘It’s not Chicago.’

  ‘You’re saying Paulet is lying?’ Powell’s voice rose with incredulity.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Carpenter?’

  ‘Maybe. No, I doubt it. But maybe he’s being lied to. Or he’s looking at the wrong thing.’

  ‘Why would you think that? Chicago’s a big enough racket for us, after all.’

  ‘That’s why it’s wrong. Chicago is big for the bootleggers there. We’ve got great customers in Chicago. They buy a lot of our stuff. But we don’t bring booze over the border there. We don’t even run a distillery in town. All we do is sell it.’

  Powell shrugged. ‘That’s still a big operation.’

  But Roeder’s mind was made up. In moods like this, he wasn’t easily shifted. ‘What else did he say? Paulet, I mean.’

  ‘Not a lot. The IRS thing is serious, though. Prosecutions for tax evasion! Jesus! You’d think they could find something else.’

  ‘Not a lot? But something? He must have said something else. We pay him enough.’

  ‘They’re digging around bank transfers. They want to connect the local operation to the centre. That means here on Wall Street – assuming it’s us they’re talking about, and we don’t know that.’

  ‘Bank transfers?’ Roeder jumped on the information greedily. ‘Bank transfers?’

  ‘Yeah, which is another point in our favour. Young Will Thornton has cleaned Marion more thoroughly than we’ve ever cleaned any place ever. The only papers that matter are sitting inside a safe on top of a stick of explosive and a can of gasoline. I don’t see how Carpenter’s guys are going to dig it out from there.’

  But Roeder didn’t answer directly. He didn’t always. Ted Powell was his boss, only it didn’t always seem that way. He grinned nastily, yellow teeth in pale gums. ‘Two things. One, get Thornton out of here. Send him on vacation. Just lose him for a week or two.’

  Powell nodded. ‘OK.’

  ‘And the second thing is, I take back what I told you a minute ago.’

  ‘What? You haven’t told me a goddamn thing.’

  ‘The girl,’ said Roeder. ‘I got the girl.’

  106

  The ribbon on Pen’s typewriter was exhausted.

  She’d never used a typewriter before coming to work at the bank, and she still had to stop and search when she needed one of the less useful letters: x, z, j, or v. What’s more, she’d never yet changed a ribbon. Which was why, with fingers inky from the carbon, and the ribbon already tangled around the typewriter’s carriage return, she got up from her desk to wash her hands. On her way to the washbasin, she passed Mr Rogers’ office. As she passed, he looked at her.

  There was nothing unusual in that, except for the way he looked at her. He was on the phone and he didn’t just glance, he stared. At her. Through her. And he was still on the phone. Still listening, still talking.

  Pen held his gaze for a full three seconds. Eyeball to eyeball for three full seconds. A man she hardly knew. Three seconds. Pen let her gaze break away and she walked down the corridor to the toilet, where she carefully washed her hands.

  Rogers had been talking about her. That was the fact which raced through her body like a wash of ice. And whatever it was he’d been speaking about, had changed him. Rogers had been alert, not bored. He’d been – what was it she’d seen? – something unusual, something new. Then she got it. He’d been thrilled. Scared, but most of all thrilled. Into Mr Rogers’ tedious little life, something dangerous had suddenly walked.

  Pen dried off her hands and walked back to Rogers’ office.

  ‘Was there anything you wanted to see me about, Mr Rogers?’

  He was taken aback. His mouth was dry, but he was working hard to appear normal. ‘No, Sarah. No, no. Nothing like that.’

  ‘It was just that you were looking at me very hard.’

  ‘Was I? Probably thinking about something else. No, no, Sarah, if I want you I only need to ring.’

  He gestured at his phone and the gesture woke him up. His self-importance returned like a favourite coat. Whatever it was that Pen had hoped to discover had slipped away again.

  But she’d seen enough. There’s no better way to train your instincts than to fly. In her days of pylon racing, Pen had flown at full speed around a course marked out by thirty-foot steel pylons. She’d had to fly close to the ground, turning the plane up to two hundred and seventy degrees, and doing it all at more than two hundred miles an hour. The turns had been so hard that the blood had literally drained from her head. A couple of times she’d momentarily lost vision as the plane came around, regaining sight only as the plane levelled. What had kept her on course, above ground, still flying, still racing?

  Instinct, only instinct.

  And it was Pen’s instinct that told her what had happened. Somehow – she couldn’t even begin to guess how – the Marion mob had uncovered her new identity. Or to be precise: it suspected it. Someone had phoned the bank for confirmation. Had they hired anyone recently? A new girl, name unknown, short hair, probably blonde but maybe dyed, slim, taller than average, tanned?

  Easy questions to ask, easy questions to answer. Rogers would have identified Pen within a few sentences. And then what? What had they told him? What had they asked of him? It was something that had shocked him, thrilled him, made him lie.

  107

  The movie theatre was advertising a Buster Keaton picture, but some dimwitted projectionist had leaned the reels up against a heating pipe and the celluloid had begun to crumple and melt. The management searched around for something else they could play instead and all they could come up with was an old flying picture: Willard T. Thornton in When We Were Heroes.

  Susan grabbed her sister’s arm. ‘Oh, Ros, look! It’s one of Willard’s.’

  Rosalind stopped uncomfortably. She’d seen a couple of Willard’s movies and hadn’t liked them. She didn’t want to see another, but couldn’t very well say so. Meantime, Susan was putting her hand in her purse to find the admission money and asking Rosalind if she wanted her popcorn sweet or salted.

  They watched the picture. Willard played a war hero. Eve Moroney, ‘the Prairie Flame’, played his girl. There was no plot. The girl kept on being kidnapped. Willard kept rescuing her, being captured, risking his life, escaping, then doing the whole lot again. The movie finished. The lights came up. The theatre, not full to start with, emptied.

  ‘Ros! No wonder you’re in love,’ said Susan. ‘Didn’t he look wonderful? Those stunts. Did he fly them himself? I hadn’t realised how –’

  She broke off. Rosalind wasn’t crying, but she was close to it. She sat forwards in her seat, eyes fixed on the empty screen.

  ‘Ros? Ros? Are you OK?’

  Rosalind nodded.

  ‘Was it seeing him with Eve Moroney? It’s only a picture.’

  ‘It wasn’t only a picture. He got her pregnant.’

  ‘Really? Wow! But, you know, that’s all over now.’

  ‘It’s not her. I don’t care about her.’

  She spoke the truth. She didn’t care about whatever had once happened between her fiancé and the famously beautiful Prairie Flame. A black kid in a uniform two sizes too big for him finished sweeping
out the trash from the other seats in the theatre and stood leaning on his broom, waiting for the two women to leave. He had big sad eyes and seemed ready to wait for ever.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Out on the street, they walked for a block in silence, before Rosalind spoke her mind.

  ‘You know, Suze, I once said to him that I loved a man who couldn’t act.’

  ‘Oh, Ros! That was a bit hard of you.’

  ‘Well, it’s not his strong point, is it? But the point is, what I saw in that picture was what I see…’ She was going to say in the bedroom, but the truth was she saw it everywhere else as well. ‘It’s what I see all the time. The same gestures. The same expressions. It’s like he’s always in front of a camera.’

  ‘Well, I suppose a thing like that gets into the blood. There are worse things in a man.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rosalind knew she was expected to say something stronger, but somehow couldn’t. When they were with friends, they seemed like the most brilliant couple in New York. But when they were alone, not dancing, not eating out, not getting drunk, just together alone, their relationship seemed to dwindle until Rosalind sometimes wondered whether she could see it at all.

  ‘He is brave, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. Very, I think.’

  ‘Clever? Handsome? Charming?’

  ‘Oh, I’m probably being an idiot. It’s probably just wedding nerves.’

  ‘It probably is, you know.’

  ‘So that’s all right then.’

  Rosalind spoke bitterly, and it was half an hour before she seemed herself again. But though her mood improved, there was one image from When We Were Heroes that she couldn’t get rid of.

  When Willard had finally thwarted the bad guys, rescued the girl, landed his plane, he had looked for a long moment direct into camera. Susan had been right, of course. Willard’s face wasn’t just good-looking, it was exceptional, a face made for the movies. But his expression! Bold – determined – triumphant – resolute – loving – masculine. There was nothing wrong with the expression. It was just right for the movie, Willard’s best scene of the film.