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Abe shrugged.
‘Listen, buddy, if you’re a man for liquor, just let us know, OK? We can let you have some cheap. Wholesale, you know.’
‘I’m OK. Thanks.’
‘Right.’ Chatting with Abe wasn’t always easy, not if you wanted your conversational balls returned over the net. The bootlegger shifted his weight again. ‘A mirror, huh?’
20 (#ulink_4e24dec0-4fde-5cd8-8842-7fe592f6fe8d)
The torture commenced.
Powell Lambert’s main business activity was trade finance. What this meant was that a manufacturer in one part of America – St Louis, say – might want to sell some goods to a buyer somewhere else completely – Seattle, for instance. The Seattle buyer would want the goods on credit, but the St Louis manufacturer would want his money right away. That was where Powell Lambert came in. As soon as the buyer and seller had agreed a purchase, Powell Lambert would promise to pay the St Louis men upfront, and collect payment in due course from Seattle. In exchange, Powell Lambert would charge a fee, half a per cent or thereabouts.
And that was it. The more trade Powell Lambert financed, the more the fees they earned. Every transaction had its own folder. Every morning, more folders arrived on Annie Hooper’s desk for her to deal out to her five young men. She was nice about it. Sweet and understanding. But remorseless. Ruthless. The folders kept pouring in. She kept handing them out. There was no other way.
And the folders!
Each transaction sounded simple, but there were a myriad details to be attended to on each one. Insurance had to be arranged, transport arrangements checked, funds transferred, receipts obtained. Each time Willard thought he’d disposed of a file, another vicious little complication would rise up and drag him back. His working hours grew longer. His weekends vanished beneath the landslide. His prospects of repaying his debt seemed negligible. His hope of succeeding his father seemed laughable.
‘Yeee-aaargh!’
It was five-thirty on a Friday afternoon. Larry Ronson’s head disappeared beneath his desk with a long drawn-out liquid gurgle. After pausing a second for effect, he poked his head out around the corner and said, ‘Miss Hooper, will you marry me?’ Annie tutted and pulled her eyes away from him, a slight blush rising into her freckled cheeks. ‘Silence will be taken to mean yes.’
‘Larry, don’t be silly.’
‘Elope with me then. We’ll live in sin in some crumbling Mexican palace with our sixteen children and spend our time writing rude postcards to Ted Powell.’
‘It’s five-thirty, anyway,’ said Annie, looking around for her coat.
‘That doesn’t settle the question.’
‘I’m off home, I mean.’
‘Women today! So practical! Whatever became of romance? I’ll dance with you down Broadway by the light of the silvery moon.’
‘It’s raining.’
‘Streetlights. Silvery streetlights.’
Annie had her bag and her coat, and was settling a little cloche-style hat on her head. ‘I’ll see you Monday.’
‘OK, how about a drink? I want to get so boiled I won’t be able to find my feet.’
Willard had been expecting Annie to refuse one further time, but this time she paused. ‘Well…’
‘Excellent. Anyone else? Leo? No? Can’t tear yourself away, I presume?’ Leo McVeigh’s massive red head peered briefly up from his paperwork. He looked at Ronson, unblinking and expressionless, the way a butcher looks at a bull, the way a bull looks at anyone. He said nothing, just put his head back to his work and continued writing, his heavy black fountain pen moving evenly across the paper. Ronson opened his hands in a kind of what-can-you-expect-from-football-players gesture. ‘Ignacio, old chap?’
Iggy Claverty glanced up briefly. ‘You know an Ignacio, do you?’
‘Iggy, you chump, I was asking if you wanted to come and toast the Eighteenth Amendment in a sea of alcohol.’
‘Can’t. I’m already drowning. Sorry.’
He waved his hand at the stack of brown files on his desk. He’d had a bad day that day. Willard had heard his swearing and sweating over some transport problem in one of the Dakotas. The stack of files in his ‘out’ pile was still much smaller than the stack of those on the ‘in’ side.
‘Mr Thornton?’
Willard was about to echo Claverty’s refusal and for the same reason, but the thought of an evening getting royally drunk was more temptation than he could handle.
‘I’m in,’ he said. ‘Just let me get these damned things bundled up for the weekend.’
He swept the files that still needed to be dealt with into his briefcase – then glanced at Hughes, then at Ronson. So far Ronson had asked everyone to come except poor old Charlie Hughes, who was blinking away behind his spectacles, watching everything. Ronson clearly had no intention of asking Hughes. Hughes, equally clearly, had no intention of asking to come.
‘Charlie,’ said Willard, ‘want a drink? Annie and Larry and I are going to get pickled.’
‘Thanks, no, it’s OK, I need to finish up, then get home. You folks go. Enjoy!’
Willard winced. Hughes always managed to get things a little bit wrong. People like Willard didn’t use phrases like ‘enjoy!’. He couldn’t have explained why not, but the right sort of people never said that, the wrong sort of people did. But Willard was glad he’d asked. He was irritated by the way Ronson treated Annie Hooper as his own property. Annie would appreciate Willard’s courtesy to the less fortunate. She had already made a handful of admiring comments about Willard’s glamorous past, to which he’d responded with carefully offhand modesty.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
They went. First to a hotel that Willard knew about, where you could get anything you wanted as long as you didn’t mind it served in a coffee cup. Then to a speakeasy off Broadway, where the drink was cheaper. To get in, you had to walk down a set of grimy, unlit steps to a shuttered steel door. Just inside, a watchman peered out to check the new arrivals weren’t cops, before the door was unbolted and Willard and the others whisked inside. Once in, they drank cocktails because they wanted hard liquor, and because the cocktails were a way of disguising the taste of the grain alcohol, the industrial alcohol, and the under-brewed green moonshine which invaded every bottle of ‘honest-to-God, straight off the boat’ Scotch whisky in New York. Then finally, drunk as Irishmen on payday, they stumbled out into the street.
‘I must say, Annie, you’re a very good sport,’ mumbled Willard. ‘A very damned good sort. Ha! A damned good sort of sport! A sporting sort with a sort of –’
‘There!’ said Annie, pointing. ‘A burger place. Joe’s Burgers. Aren’t you starving?’
Ronson followed her unsteady arm with an unsteady eye. ‘Not necessarily a burger place,’ he objected. ‘Maybe that’s the fellow’s name. Mr Joe Burger. I should think the poor old gooseberry gets rather annoyed with people knocking him up and asking him for burgers. Poor old Mr B.’
The three of them swayed over to the burger stand. Annie hadn’t drunk as much as either of the men, but she was every bit as sozzled. Willard and Ronson fought over which of them would be allowed to take her arm, and only declared a truce once Annie gave her left arm to Willard and her right one to Ronson.
Willard had enjoyed the evening, but he’d enjoyed it the way a prisoner on death row gets a kick out of a postcard from outside. Even now, drunk as he was, Willard felt his lack of freedom. Willard’s salary, net of Powell’s deduction for interest, left him hardly any better off than Annie. Unlike her, he had the use of a company apartment and the part of his father’s twenty-five thousand he hadn’t already spent. But he wasn’t an Annie, a mouse content with crumbs. With a kind of reckless defiance, Willard had changed his spending habits almost not at all. In the past two weeks alone, he’d spent six hundred dollars on clothes, thirteen hundred dollars on new furniture, another few hundred dollars to have the seats in his Packard re-upholstered in pale calfskin. Before too long, his bank account would be as dry as a busted fuel tank. What he’d do then, he didn’t know – he refused to think about it.
And that wasn’t all. Six weeks since starting work, he was no further ahead. His loan was not a nickel smaller. His chance of repaying it not a hundredth of a per cent higher. All his life, Willard had known there were two sorts of people: the rich and the not-rich, the free and the unfree. He had always been of the first sort. Had been. He was the second sort now. He and his two colleagues stood in line, under a light July rain, belching and privately regretting their last cocktail.
‘I must say,’ said Ronson to Willard, ‘you’re a lot better than our last fellow.’
‘Hmm?’
‘You know. Martin. Our late-lamented colleague. Esteemed and lamented.’
Even in his drunken state, Willard pricked up his ears. Arthur Martin had been the fifth member of the Powell Lambert ‘engine room’ before Willard’s arrival. Willard had inherited his desk, his paperwork and even his company-owned apartment. All Willard really knew of the man was that he had been killed in an auto accident shortly before Willard’s arrival at the firm.
‘So, when was the auto smash? When did the poor fellow die?’
‘Eh? You know,’ said Ronson. ‘You know.’
‘Gentlemen, please,’ said Annie, using her chin to point to a gap that had opened in the line ahead of them. The two men frog-marched Annie forwards until they had caught up.
‘I don’t know,’ said Willard. ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t ask, would I?’
‘Well…’
‘It was only…’
Annie and Ronson both spoke at once, then stopped. Then Annie spoke alone.
‘He died the Thursday before you arrived. We thought you knew.’
Willard felt a tiny prickle of something run through him. Afterwards, he thought maybe it was fear or the first premonition that something was wrong. But perhaps it was only the underbrewed moonshine talking. Perhaps the prickle was nothing more than a simple shudder in the rain. In any case, when Willard answered, he suddenly felt less drunk, less stupid.
‘But that couldn’t be. Powell had already told me which apartment I’d be staying in. He couldn’t have done that, if the poor devil Martin was already there.’ He didn’t mention it, but the same was also true about the ‘engine room’. There were five desks there, plus Annie’s. The room couldn’t have fitted another one. If arrangements had been made for Willard’s arrival, wouldn’t someone have thought to introduce an additional desk?
‘It was, though,’ said Annie. ‘The Thursday before you came.’
‘Powell must have been in a muddle. Good job in a way. You wouldn’t have wanted to arrive with all your boxes and find… I mean, not a good job the fellow died, obviously. What I mean is, good job the place was empty.’
‘Powell wasn’t in a muddle,’ said Willard, argumentatively. ‘It wasn’t just him, I mean I had to phone and confirm and collect keys and everything. It wasn’t just a case of turn up, mister.’
‘Then Martin must have been moving somewhere else, mustn’t he? Couldn’t have the two of you living on top of each other. Any case, Martin wasn’t a decent sort, like you. Didn’t appreciate the merits of a fine bottle of…’
The line moved forwards again but neither of the men had noticed. Annie wriggled free of their arms and stood ahead of them, asking them what sort of burger they wanted.
‘Good old Joe Burger,’ said Ronson. ‘A veritable prince of gooseberries. Ruining his Friday evenings to help the starving.’
‘Willard, what are you having?’
Annie turned to him, her fine brown hair damped down against her cheek. Willard stared at her blankly.
‘Old chap, your mouth is hanging open. Mr B here will probably have to stuff it closed with one of his excellent pickled gherkins.’
Willard shook his head. How had Ted Powell known that Arthur Martin’s apartment and Arthur Martin’s desk would be empty in time for Willard’s arrival? The question had no possible answer.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not feeling hungry.’
He pulled away from them and walked fast uptown, hatless through the pattering rain.
21 (#ulink_6b832205-6a65-5491-9b1a-b2a22318eeae)
Abe ran through the little belt of turbulence over the Florida coast, turned, applied a side-slip with the nose into the wind. Then, just before the ground came up, he levelled the wings and kicked Poll straight with the rudder. The wheels came straight and touched down. As Poll began to shake her speed off into the grass, he let the tail float down as the elevator lost authority. He was a little later than he’d expected, partly because of headwinds, partly because he’d overflown one of the Marion launches on its way south. These days, he’d got into a routine with the bootleggers. They’d flash to him, signalling their presence and he’d flip into an aerobatic routine: loops, spins, barrel-rolls, dives. Once he came so low over the water at the launch, that by the time his undercarriage flashed over their heads, one of the bootleggers had been scared enough to jump overboard. The stunts were much appreciated. In the café in the Puerto del Ingles, Abe was a mini-celebrity. His drinks were always bought for him. He was showered with gifts: cigars, booze, chocolate. His routines grew more elaborate, more complex.
For now, though, Abe just taxied over to the hangar and stopped. The blur of propeller blades slowed to a flicker, then to a halt. Abe climbed wearily from the cockpit, pulled helmet and goggles off, scrubbed his head, face and neck under a cold tap. The hangar wasn’t just a place for Poll to come in out of the weather, it was Abe’s home too. As well as room for Poll and room for all the maintenance equipment she needed, Abe had set up a camp bed and thin mattress. He also had a sheet, a blanket, a coat rolled into a pillow, a small table, two chairs, two enamel mugs and plates, a primus stove, and a bag which contained his entire wardrobe. Aside from what was in the hangar or on his back, Abe owned nothing in the entire world.
He dried off with an end of towel. The beat of an airplane engine still thrummed in his ears, but it sometimes did after a long flight. He rubbed the sides of his head with his palms and listened again. The thrumming was still there, and it was a sound different from Poll’s. It was stronger, racier, deeper, cleaner. Abe jumped on an oilcan to get a better view, then saw it.
A plane was coming in from the south. She was flying low, steel-grey bodywork glinting in the sun. She was the most beautiful machine Abe had ever seen: a gloriously streamlined, squat-tailed biplane with stubby little wings and an engine asnarl with power. That she was a racing plane was obvious. That she was in trouble even more so.
The engine had a problem. It was running foul, firing wrong, missing beats. And there was another problem. Abe’s airfield had been designed for Poll. Because Poll was slow, she didn’t need much room to land or take off. And when the Miami authorities had approved the grant of land for an airfield, they had approved enough for Poll and not an inch more. The little racing plane didn’t have room to land.
The little plane howled overhead, its engine note all wrong. Abe watched, helpless. The longest strip of clear space on the airfield was on the diagonal, but a line of telegraph poles ruled out that approach. The little plane came to the same conclusion. It buzzed off towards the southwest, but Abe knew that the south-west held few options. A beach was fine for Poll’s slow and sturdy ways. But a racing plane could easily smash up on a beach. No. Abe corrected himself. Not could, would. Would smash up. Abe stared another moment, then ran to Poll. If he could get airborne fast, he could follow the pilot, and be on hand for the coming catastrophe.
But he was too late. The little plane came again. She was flying desperately low to the ground, tree-skimming and dune-hopping. Abe breathed slowly and evenly through his mouth. He silently urged the pilot not to do what he was about to do.
In vain.
The little plane sank lower. It was flying just twenty feet off the ground, dead level with the telegraph poles, dead level with the wire. It was an insane way to fly in any case, but here on the coast, with the turbulent ocean breezes making any manoeuvre vastly more difficult, it was beyond lunatic. The plane kept coming. Heading for the telegraph wire, heading for extinction.
The plane got closer – closer – closer – then at the last possible moment dipped its nose down. Like a terrier easing under a gate, the little plane scuffed its way beneath the wire. Its wingtips were so close to the telegraph posts on either side, Abe could virtually hear them twang. The pilot held his four feet of altitude another half second, then touched down on the airfield within mere yards of the boundary.
It was precision flying of the highest calibre, but the danger wasn’t over.
The pilot had already cut his approach speed to the bare minimum, but the plane was still running too fast. The aircraft tore across the airfield, kicking up a storm of dust from its wheels, its tailskid digging into the sand. Slowly – too slowly? – the racer lost speed. The pilot was using fullback stick, to drive the tail down and maximise drag from the wings. All the same, the little plane bounded three-quarters of the way across the field – then four-fifths – then nine-tenths – then ended up, engine still running, just fifteen yards from a three-foot ditch.
After a short pause, the racer made a cautious turn and bumped slowly up to the hangar.
Up close, the machine was beautiful – stunning. Abe recognised the plane as one of the Curtiss R6 series of planes, purpose-built racers, winners of all the flying competitions in 1922 and 1923, and holders of the world speed record before the Europeans had snatched it back. The plane was power and force and beauty and speed. Abe was open-mouthed with envy and delight.
The plane came up and stopped. The air emptied of sound, huge and hollow after the noise.
Abe looked at the pilot, whose head poked out from a cockpit screened by a low windshield raked back hard from the nose. The pilot was only just visible in the cramped cockpit, dust- and oil-stained, still helmeted and goggled, but obviously young and boyish. The pilot caught Abe’s glance and raised a gauntleted hand.
Abe nodded in answer.
The hand fell back and thumped the edge of the cockpit twice. The gesture meant ‘Thanks, old girl’, or maybe, ‘Thanks and sorry’. It was a gesture Abe had used often enough. He knew the pilot’s feelings: a mixture of relief, exhaustion, happiness, shock – a bubbling brew which took hours to settle.
The pilot took another few moments to gather himself, then pulled a face. The face might have meant something about luck and close shaves and being relieved, or it might just have been that his heart was still pounding in his chest and he was too tired to say anything sensible. Abe stood back, didn’t try to rush things.
Then the newcomer pulled off his goggles and dropped them in the cockpit. He was young, terribly young, reminiscent of the boys who had served with Abe in France. Served and died, in so many cases. He stood back as the pilot got ready to jump out. For a second – or less, perhaps just half a second – the pilot paused, as though expecting Abe to step forwards and offer a hand. But maybe not. Shock could make even the most familiar things seem strange. In any case, the pause ended. The pilot put his hands to the side of the cockpit and rolled his body out and onto the ground. He was around Abe’s height and, as far as you could tell anything about a person wrapped head to toe in sheepskin, thin.
‘That was a heck of a landing. One of the best bits of flying I’ve ever seen.’
The pilot smiled and puffed out with relief. Then he put his hand to his head and removed his helmet.
Or rather, not.
Not his head, his helmet. But her head, her helmet. Abe goggled in astonishment as a pretty sandy bob emerged into the strong Miami light. The pilot’s face was boyish, but it was boyish the way that the fashion plates in the women’s magazines were boyish, fine-boned but unfussy, clear-skinned, fresh and direct. It was an attractive face, the sort of face a man could like straight away and never change his mind about.
The woman smiled.
‘Hi.’
22 (#ulink_f8257bca-30ff-549b-90ad-7c98e0c2ed85)
As problems went, it ought to have been a small one.
The Association of Orthodox Synagogues was expecting a consignment of ‘Sacred Books and Sacramental Materials’ from a Long Island based import-export outfit. The documents were in good order. The goods were in Long Island, ready for delivery. Insurance and transportation arrangements had been settled. But there was a problem.
The customer named on the delivery note was the Association of Orthodox Synagogues. But the beneficiary named in the insurance documentation was the Associated Synagogues of New York. Did it matter? Maybe not. But if there was a screw-up and Powell Lambert took a hit, then it would be Willard who suffered, no one else.
