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‘I’m sorry, Mr Powell, I thought you said I should call you…’
‘When I said that, Thornton, you were not my employee.’
‘Yes, Mr Powell.’
The silence lasted a second or two longer than it should have done.
‘Well?’
‘Nothing, sir. Thank you.’
Willard went to the empty desk and sat down.
16 (#ulink_9d365501-76ce-52c6-bb2c-6415f044995d)
Down in the swampy heat and dirt roads of southern Georgia, a little red-headed kid, aviation crazy as he was, got an envelope through the post. The letter contained a movie poster signed by Willard T. Thornton. It wasn’t Lundmark’s battered old poster, but a brand new one, large and glossy, with an extravagant signature in thick blue pencil that came pretty near to deleting the smaller figure of Willard’s leading lady and co-star. Along with the poster there was a short note in a separate envelope addressed to Captain Rockwell. Brad didn’t know where to find Abe, but he put the envelope aside in case.
And the poster?
There Brad had a problem. His main hero (by a long way) was Abe Rockwell. Next on the list was Ed Rickenbacker. A long, long way after that came some of the other names from the American war in the air and, definitely on the list but a fair way down it, came Willard Thornton. If Brad had just put his poster up, slap-bang on the wall of the sitting room, it would have looked as though he ranked Thornton right up with the best of them. The idea outraged Brad’s sense of decency. So in the end, he compromised. The poster was too good not to be displayed, but Thornton didn’t merit a place in either the sitting room or Brad’s attic bedroom. And so Thornton’s handsome face found itself in the lean-to. But the walls of the little room were covered with shelves, so Brad tacked it to the ceiling instead, where it hung upside down, looming down as though the movie star were about to come diving to earth. In the meantime, Brad had got out his father’s old carpentry tools and built a frame for the photo which Abe had signed minutes after his abrupt arrival in Independence. The photo of Abe went on the mantelpiece, only a few inches sideways from the photo of Brad’s father.
Abe in the living room, Thornton in the lean-to. Brad figured he’d got it just about right.
17 (#ulink_1092fb18-1b95-5c73-be59-843ca25bcdb6)
‘Heck, Rockwell, nice to see you again. Darn nice. Very dang darn nice.’
General Superintendent Carl Egge of the Air Mail Service of the United States Post Office puffed up and down, pumping Abe’s hand. The two men had known each other from two or three years before, when Egge had been in charge of the St Louis–Minneapolis sector of the transcontinental route and Abe had been his senior pilot.
‘Nice to see you too, Egge.’
‘Carl, please! Lord’s sakes! Can you think of anything sounds dumber than Egge? Lord! I once worked right alongside a fellow with quite a name too. Can you guess what he was called? Huh? Give you a hint there. We made quite a famous pair.’
Abe knew perfectly well the name of Egge’s former coworker, because Egge had told him on a dozen occasions in the past.
‘No idea, Carl.’
‘Jimmy Bacon. Bacon. Egge and Bacon. How about that?’
‘Very good.’
‘I’ll say! Boy! Egge and Bacon! Quite a pair!’
Egge puffed and hooted his way into something like quietness. They talked a little about Egge’s plans for the Air Mail Service, before Abe brought up the subject he’d come to discuss.
‘Say, Carl, you ever thought of opening up an international route?’
‘Hoo! Boy! Do you ever come up with some queer ideas! International? I should say not.’
‘It’s the next step.’
‘Yeah, but you ever been to Canada?’ Egge leaned forward and whispered confidentially. ‘It’s kinda snowy.’ He leaned back. ‘That’s difficult flying, Captain. Heck, they’re only letters.’
‘Cuba.’
‘Cuba? Coo-ba?’
‘It’s only ninety miles off the coast. In time, you could push the service on into the islands.’
‘Cooo-ba? Habana, Coooooo-ba? Could be. Neat idea. Don’t know how much mail there is.’
‘I’d fly the route. Carry passengers. Take a little cargo. I just need the mail to get me started.’
‘Heck, Rockwell, there’s other routes I might be able to find for you. Not Cuba though.’
Abe shook his head. He couldn’t say so, but it was Cuba that interested him, nowhere else. When he’d followed those two green-painted launches south from Marion, they’d headed down the Florida coast, skipping Bahama, Bimini and Andros, and made straight for the Puerto del Ingles, a little harbour a mile or two west of Havana. He’d continued to watch. In one single week he’d counted fifteen launches running south from Marion to Havana – and that meant the same number returning under cover of night. Fifteen launches, a hundred cases of booze on each, and a raw profit of thirty or forty bucks the case-load. Carry that on for fifty weeks a year, and there was a million-dollar racket running right under Gibson Hennessey’s nose.
‘Cuba would be a good start. You’d have your first international route right there.’
‘No. No authority. Looks likely Congress will put airmail routes up for tender some time soon. But domestic ones. Boston–New York. Chicago–St Louis. That kind of thing. International? Who knows?’
‘You don’t get things if you don’t push for them, Carl.’
‘No, siree, you don’t. And don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a good idea. You know me. I’d like all letters to go by plane. Stony Brook, North Dakota – whoosh!’ His hand soared off the desk, like an airplane in take-off. ‘Muddy Creek, South Dakota – whoosh!’ His hand landed again, nose first, very fast. ‘Your letter, ma’am. US Post Office at your service.’ He saluted. ‘Congress. It’s Congress is the problem. Those guys can’t think beyond costs. Look.’ He held up his hands, wrist to wrist, in the shape of a cross and waggled them. ‘My hands are tied. Sorry, pal. We got smart people in this country, only you know our problem? We got the government we got.’
‘Cost? That’s the problem?’
‘Just a wee little bitty of an itty-bitty problem.’
Abe struggled with himself again. The temptation to quit was always there, never fading. If Egge denied him a route, then Abe could maybe give up on his plans with an easy conscience… But with Abe, the black dog Conscience never lay quiet for long.
‘I’ll do it for free,’ he said, in a low voice.
‘Beg pardon? For free?’
‘It’s the validation I want, not the revenue. I figure I’ll get business more easily if people see Uncle Sam is happy to ride with me.’
Egge nodded solemnly. For all his fooling, he was a smart man, with an inflexible determination to build the US Air Mail Service. His nods grew slower and deeper.
‘For free? A daily service?’
‘Yes.’
Egge thought for a moment, then grinned. ‘Correos del Estados Unidos. Sounds good, huh?’
18 (#ulink_3dc81b8d-197e-53e0-a4c9-e3f81401b6e8)
Willard sat down. Powell left the room. The door closed. Nothing moved.
Then one of the young men broke the stillness by standing up. He was below medium height, with dark curly hair, quick eyes and a look of amusement.
‘“When I said that, Thornton, you were not my employee”,’ he quoted. ‘Don’t mind Powell too much, old fellow. He likes to be a bit fierce.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’m Larry Ronson, by the way. Most of us do have first names around here, though it’s easy to forget it at times.’
The other men came over too.
Leonard McVeigh was a bull-necked red-head, with a strong grip and a look of military directness. He mangled Willard’s hand, grunting ‘Good to have you with us.’ He held Willard’s eyes for a second, as though checking to see how much competitive threat the newcomer might pose, before dropping back and letting the last two men come close.
‘Iggy Claverty,’ said one, as tall as Willard though not as broad, olive-skinned. ‘And before you dare to ask, Iggy is short for Ignacio. And before you dare to speculate, yes my mother is Spanish but no, I am not secretly a Catholic; no, I do not stink of garlic; and no, I do not have three hundred poor relations living in Spain. Finally, before you decide what to call me, you should know that any use of the name Ignacio will buy you a kick in the seat of your pants.’
‘OK, Iggy, I’ll remember.’
The last man was Charlie Hughes. Right from that moment, Hughes struck Willard as a misfit. The other men – Ronson, Claverty, McVeigh – were the sort of fellows Willard had roomed with at Princeton. They were smart enough, good-looking enough, well dressed. Men like these had been the life-blood of Princeton, standard issue for the East Coast social scene. Willard’s four sisters flirted with men like these. They petted with men like these. One day they’d marry men like these.
But not Hughes.
Hughes was no shorter than Ronson and not much lighter. But where you could imagine all the other men playing tennis or a game of ball or messing around in boats or on the beach, Hughes was different. He stood out. His hands were fidgety and nervous. His spectacles were thick and bookish. His clothes were decent enough, but the cut wasn’t quite right, the fashions weren’t quite of the moment, the poor fellow’s tie wasn’t even tied right.
‘Hughes. Charlie Hughes. Hello. Nice to have you join us. Really.’
He nodded once too often, shook Willard’s hand once more than he should have done.
Willard, whose instinct for these things was immaculate, instantly placed Hughes at the bottom of the pack. The pack-leader he guessed was probably Larry Ronson, for his intelligence and likeability, though Willard couldn’t see Leo McVeigh being bossed around by any of them. That left Iggy Claverty, court jester to Ronson’s prince. Willard’s colossal debt and his bootblack-style income was a disaster whichever way he looked at it. But at least his new work colleagues were ones he was sure he’d get on with. His nerves began to recede.
‘And allow me to introduce you to the sun of our little solar system, the flower of our garden, the lovely Miss Annabelle Hooper.’
Larry Ronson took Willard over to the secretary’s circular desk. Miss Hooper, blushing, stood up to shake Willard’s hand. She was mid-twenties, brunette, light blue eyes, freckled, petite. She was pretty, but unspectacular, the sort of girl you’d be happy to kiss, but not the sort you’d want on your arm anywhere important.
‘Just Annie, for heaven’s sake. Don’t listen to Larry.’
‘What, never?’ said Willard. ‘You’re very stern.’
‘Oh no!’
‘Oh yes!’ said Ronson. ‘Powell barketh, but Miss Hooper biteth. And if she says she don’t, then she speaketh not the truth. See this?’ He held up a brown manila folder, perhaps half an inch thick. ‘This may look like office stationery. It may feel, smell and – for all I know – taste like office stationery. But all that’s a snare and a deception. These files will consume your life. They’re the curse of Powell Lambert. Mr Claverty, if you please…’
Ronson handed the file to Iggy Claverty, who took it with an air of exaggerated ceremony. Bringing the file over to Willard, he held it out with both hands, as though the file were a precious gift being handed to a king. He bowed his head.
‘May the torture commence.’
19 (#ulink_d9f830f8-ba5e-58d6-95fd-805bb94dc36b)
Abe sat at the back of a café on the waterfront. On the drink-slopped table in front of him, he had a glass of brown rum and a plate of rice and fish. A cheap mystery novel lay half-read by his elbow. Outside the café, ocean and sunlight combined to scrub the air so clean it sparkled.
Abe was a mail pilot now. For the Havana end of his business, he had rented a field a little way inland from the Puerto del Ingles. In Miami, he’d persuaded the city authorities to release land for their very own international airport. The Miami field was hardly less basic than the Havana one: comprising an oblong of sandy grass, three hundred yards at its longest, and a tin-roofed, steel-framed hangar. Each day for four weeks now, Abe took off from Miami not long after dawn with a bag of US mail for Havana. He washed off, walked down to the Puerto del Ingles, and took an early lunch, before returning to his airplane in the hope that the Cuban postal authorities wouldn’t be more than a couple of hours late in bringing the US-bound mail. When it finally arrived, Abe flew it to Miami, job done.
Abe sipped his rum and went back to his novel. In the corner of the bar, a bunch of bootleggers from Marion were on their way to getting drunk. And they were bootleggers, of course. Here, in free and easy Cuba, there was no need to disguise the fact. True, the wooden crates they loaded into their boats were marked ‘Maís de Aranjuez’ or ‘Jamón Serrano de Cuba’. But the markings meant nothing. Often enough the crates weren’t even lidded properly. The bottles of Johnny Walker or Gordon’s Gin shone out as plain as day.
Behind the bar, a home-made radio set tried its hardest to pick up a station from Miami. Mostly the set couldn’t get a signal, just the whistle and crackle of empty space. Abe read. The bootleggers drank. The radio whistled.
After an hour or so, one of the bootleggers lurched up from his seat and came swaying past Abe’s table. The bootlegger’s bleary eyes focused on Abe’s grey mailbag, and the leather helmet and goggles looped around the handles. The man stopped, stared – then inspiration struck.
‘Hey Birdman!’ he said, flapping his arms. ‘Birdman, Birdman.’
He stopped and grinned again, as though expecting Abe to declare that was the first time he’d heard that joke in all his ten years of aviation. Abe did and said nothing. The bootlegger revved his brain to full throttle and came up with something else every bit as funny.
‘Hey, Birdie. I wanna send a postcard, you gotta stamp?’
The man leered at his friends for applause, and got it. Abe said nothing, did nothing. The man cast around in the cavernous emptiness of his skull for anything else funny, but came away with nothing. He lingered a second or two, then headed off to get drinks.
That was that.
But then, just three days later, Abe was back in the same bar with the same bunch. The radio had, for once, found a jazz tune and was holding to it with a kind of feeble determination. This time another one of the bootleggers approached. Not drunk this time, and not offensive.
‘Hey, pal, sorry about the other day. That birdman stuff. Guess that ain’t funny, huh?’
‘Not too funny, nope.’
‘You ain’t sore?’
‘No.’
The bootlegger looked down at Abe’s mailsack. It was a small bag. Mostly Abe carried just a few pounds of mail each way. At a commercial rate of a few nickels a pound, he’d have been a million miles from profit. Flying as he was for free, he was a million and one miles short.
‘You carry mail? That’s all?’
‘Cargo, passengers, anything that pays.’
‘You do OK at that?’
Abe shrugged.
‘Guess you must.’
Abe shrugged again. A shrug wasn’t a statement, so it couldn’t be a lie. But the fact was that Abe hadn’t had a single customer since starting business.
‘You’re sure you ain’t sore? You didn’t answer us today.’
‘Answer you?’
‘We signalled from the boat. We saw you coming in. Fired off a handgun. Da-da-da-da-da-dum. That didn’t do nothing, so we shot off the rifle. Boom, boom.’
‘I sit six feet from a ninety-horse engine in an eighty-mile-an-hour wind.’
‘You didn’t hear nothing?’
‘Use a mirror. You want to signal, you need to flash.’
‘Huh, OK.’ The bootlegger shifted his weight from leg to leg. ‘Sorry about the other day, OK?’
