Glory Boys (18 page)

California had been brash, he’d decided. The girls there had lacked class. Too much sunshine, too little sophistication. Rosalind, now, was sophisticated. She had class. She knew how to dress, how to drink, how to talk, how to act, how to move…

He’d been thinking this, half daydreaming, before realising she had turned towards him. Earlier, over dinner, they’d started a conversation, but hadn’t finished it. He’d told her about Charlie Hughes and asked her to tell him what she knew about Arthur Martin.

‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ she’d answered. ‘Susan says that Arthur began acting strangely about a month before he died. Jumpy. Nervous. On one occasion, he told her that Powell Lambert was up to no good. He seemed to have a grudge against the place.’

‘What sort of no good?’

‘Don’t know. He wouldn’t say. Just before he died, he told Susan that he was collecting some documents. Incriminating, so he said. He seemed on the lookout for foul play. Almost expected it. Then the auto wreck. It wasn’t an accident. It was almost an insult, the way they staged it.’

‘And the documents?’

‘We couldn’t find them. We went through all his personal possessions as soon as we could. That was why I came back to the apartment. To see if I could find them there.’

‘I’ve made a really thorough search. The place was cleaned out before I arrived.’

They’d left it there, but both knew the conversation was unfinished. A black waiter, his head nodding with the jazz, brought them cocktails and a bowl of roasted nuts. The song finished. Rosalind let out an ‘Ah!’ of appreciation and began to clap. The waiter, speaking to Rosalind not to Willard, said, ‘They sure good, these fellers.’ Rosalind beamed at him, still clapping.

‘Excellent,’ said Willard, clapping hard. ‘Excellent.’

The waiter left. Rosalind turned back to the table.

‘You’ll quit, I imagine?’

‘I want to, yes.’

‘Want
to?’

‘I can’t. I made a movie in Hollywood before I left. You know. Wrote it. Acted. Directed. Produced. Ted Powell financed it. The movie didn’t do what everyone expected. It’s a difficult business, you know. Lots of angles. It’s not enough to make a quality film, the distributors are like sharks, really.’

‘You owe Powell money?’

‘Two hundred thousand dollars.’

‘Oh my goodness!’ Rosalind’s hand flew to her mouth and stayed there for a while, as her grey eyes flickered over his face. ‘You’ll be careful, then?’

Willard gestured helplessly. ‘Yes, but of what? At least in the war I knew who I was fighting.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Whatever I can. Locating an enemy is the first thing.’

‘On your own?’

‘I hope not.’

‘Then who?’ Her voice petered out as she caught Willard’s drift. The jazz band had started up again, a faster number than the last one, but neither Willard nor Rosalind were listening now.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘Are you in?’

She swallowed hard. The question wasn’t a small one. One man had died, another one had been imprisoned. Now a third man was asking her to join the fight. A man she hardly knew. A man whose presence could mean only danger. She reached automatically for her cocktail, but didn’t drink. Her eyes locked on Willard’s handsome face, his blue eyes, his strong masculine chin. He seemed to promise something trustworthy. Something resolute. Something dependable.

‘Oh my goodness. Yes, all right. I’m in.’

And that was that. A positive end to the evening in every way.

Except for one thing.

As they left, a little drunk, a little excited, Willard collected Rosalind’s fur from the coat-check. He dropped a quarter into the girl’s discreet little saucer, a stingy tip by his standards, but he was becoming ever more conscious of his ailing bank account. As he did so, he felt a glance hot on the back of his neck and whirled around to meet it.

And there he was. Long-nosed Greyhound-face from the public library. Staring. Eyes empty but confrontational. There was a meaningless pause. Nothing happened. Nothing was said. Then Greyhound-face offered a temporary yellow smile, popped a matchstick into his mouth and left.

A coincidence? Maybe.

But a disconcerting one? Definitely.

37

Gibson Hennessey sat on his porch smoking.

He enjoyed watching the Georgian sun go fizzing down in a cloud of red and gold. He liked the shade of his porch and the way he could hear the night birds and the crickets take over from the sights and sounds of the day. He liked staying out of the house, when his wife was sending his kids bawling up to wash. And he liked the tobacco. Nowhere grows better tobacco than Georgia, and Hennessey got his from a farm which worked a little magic on those precious golden leaves.

He inhaled, relaxed and pondered. And what he pondered was this. One week ago, the kid Lundmark had finally got his mom’s permission to get himself apprenticed down in Brunswick. Instead, the kid had ridden a freight train to Miami and headed on to the airfield there.

The kid had pitched up early, but too late to catch Abe. No problem. The kid made himself useful. He sharpened Abe’s tools, ground chisels ’til their edges flashed silver, threw sawdust onto oil spills and swept up after. He kicked open the door of the lean-to office and cleaned the place top to bottom. He lingered on the long shelf of castings above the workbench. Each loaf-sized model was perfectly cast, flawless, but also strange, apparently useless. Why would a guy want thirty or forty model airplanes? Not even airplanes, most of them, just airplane parts really. The kid didn’t know, but didn’t pause long. He’d brought with him the letter to Abe that Willard Thornton had enclosed with the movie poster. Brad left the letter propped by Abe’s coffee pot.

And there had been just one final job. In the darkest corner of the hangar, under a light bulb that was broken and not replaced, a filthy cotton sheet had been pulled over a stack of boxes. Brad pulled the sheet away and saw what was underneath. Cases of booze, stacked high.

Abe Rockwell, liquor smuggler. It was impossible to believe and impossible not to.

The kid stared at the huge illegal stack through eyes that pricked with tears. For twenty minutes he drifted around the empty hangar, watching the dust dance in the sun and chewing peanut brittle from a bar gone furry in his pocket. What was there to say? What was there to think?

And when the southern sky began to burr with an approaching engine, the kid took one last look at his hero’s home. Then he ran. Away from the hangar, over fifty yards of pockmarked sand to a line of scrubby bushes, then through the bushes and on, not stopping, until he reached the bright city lights. The next day he’d been in Brunswick, looking for work. Back home on Sunday, he’d told his mom nothing and Hennessey everything.

Abe Rockwell, liquor smuggler.

That was what the old storekeeper pondered as he smoked and watched the dying of the sun.

38

Abe saw the changes.

The place was cleaner, tidier, newer, shinier. Floors had been swept, things dusted. Moving slowly, Abe checked out his property. He checked his workbenches, his castings, his sleeping area, the stash of booze. He pushed at the door of the little office, and found the place brightened up, actually clean, no little brown spiders anywhere in sight. Abe continued to check things over, but slowly. The little metal table. The floor. The places in the roof where the sheets of tin overlapped and caused a sharp-edged hazard for anyone who stood too quickly. Abe’s eyes narrowed. Reaching towards the low edge of the room, Abe found two hairs, caught in one of the chinks. The hairs were short, about an inch and a quarter long. And red. Just as though they’d come from little Brad Lundmark, the red-headed kid from Independence.

Abe’s face tightened for a moment and his expression hardened. Then, as though to shake away the feeling, he rubbed his face, washed, and ate, making supper from a loaf of bread, a tin of meat, a mango. It was only when he came to make coffee that he found the letter which Lundmark had left. The letter was from Willard Thornton. Only a few lines long, it attempted a curious mixture of warmth and independence, boastfulness and humility. Abe’s one-time lieutenant, it seemed, had given up the movie business in favour of Wall Street, ‘Trade finance, would you believe it!’ The letter ended with the vaguest of invitations to look him up should Abe ever be in New York. Abe read the letter a couple of times, smiled, then put it away. He wasn’t planning on being in New York any time soon. Even if he was, he wasn’t too sure Willard would be happy to see his old commander. But he was pleased the guy was getting on with his life. Finance seemed like a better career than making movies.

Meantime, Abe had other things to think about. Dressing in dark, inconspicuous city clothes, he left the airfield. He walked into town and found an anonymous all-night café with a phone booth.

‘Your party, please?’ said the operator brusquely, like she had better things to do than handle callers. Abe gave her a number. A dim chatter on the line lasted a few seconds. Then a man’s voice, sounding loud and close. ‘US Coastguard.’

‘Good evening. I have some information for you.’

‘Who’s calling please?’

‘Two launches, forty feet long, painted green, maximum speed twenty-seven knots, will enter the Okefenokee River in Okinochee County, Georgia at between midnight and two a.m., Monday. The boats will each be carrying one hundred fifty cases of hard liquor.’

The man’s voice at the other end of the line changed. It became hard and direct. ‘Please. Who’s calling? You must identify yourself.’

‘Each boat is manned by two men, armed with handguns and rifles. There is a bow-mounted searchlight on each boat. There is no automatic weaponry.’

‘Who is providing this information, please?’

‘You be sure to have a good evening now,’ said Abe, and hung up.

Another step taken. Another step forward. Another step closer to a place he didn’t want to go.

39

There was a ring outside the door.

Literally. Not a knock or a ring on the electric doorbell, but a strong, bright ringing sound. Willard was due to meet Rosalind around now – but the bell, what the hell was that about?

Willard crept up to the door and listened. The sound of the bell was dying away, but he could hear breathing and a floorboard creaking under someone’s weight. Willard now kept a gun in his bedside drawer. He thought about fetching it, but decided against. All the time now, he felt under strain. There was the pressure of work, the pressure of his almost empty bank account, the pressure of his vanished future. And now, too, the pressure of danger, red-tinted, dragon-toothed.

Squeezing his fear and self-pity to one side, he flung the door open. Outside stood a woman dressed in a black coat, black hat and a broad scarlet sash with
Temperance Army
embroidered on it in white. Seeing Willard, Rosalind grinned, pulled off her hat and let her dark gold hair tumble down.

‘Temperance Army,’ she said huskily. ‘We have reports of some terrible sinning taking place at this address.’

Willard felt angry and relieved at the same time, but was careful to let only the relief show. ‘Gosh, it’s you. Come right on in. I believe some sinning was just about to commence.’ He led her in, to a jug of iced martini. ‘Well? How d’you get on?’

‘I’m not sure,’ she said, removing her sash and coat. ‘The first problem was how to spend time in the neighbourhood without looking out of place. I thought about borrowing one of my maid’s dresses, but then what was I meant to be doing hanging around an intersection on the Lower East Side all day? Then it came to me. If I was going to be out of place, I might as well be
really
out of place. So I signed up with the Temperance Army and told them I wanted to bring in sinners. I’ve been there for two days, ringing my bell and shouting myself hoarse. Nobody took a second look at me. A few folks felt sorry for me and took some of my leaflets, bless them.’

‘And?’

‘Not a rabbi in sight. Not even Jews, really, certainly not the religious types. I’d bet my life that there’s no Jewish religious organisation anywhere close.’

Willard nodded slowly. ‘But Powell Lambert finances everything they need. Holy books, vestments, furnishings for the synagogues. Everything. Twenty-nine thousand dollars’ worth of materials in the last year alone.’

‘All to that address?’

‘Yes.’

‘A mistake maybe?’

‘No. It’s not just a single bit of paper, you see. There’s insurance, transportation, certification, billing, all kinds of things. It’s an amazingly complex business, this trade finance game.’

‘Yes, I see.’ Rosalind sipped her martini thoughtfully. She had an odd way of doing it: lowering her mouth to the glass before tipping it, like a churchgoer at communion.

‘Storage?’ asked Willard suddenly.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Storage? Was there any place to store goods if they did arrive? A warehouse or something?’

‘Not a warehouse, but there was a garage at the back. Big double doors, always locked. I couldn’t get in or see in.’

‘Hmm.’ Willard swigged his martini and put it down. In the past, he’d never thought of himself as an intelligent man. Beyond a certain point, in fact, Willard thought of intelligence as a social failing: like not being able to hold drink or being no good at sport. But times had changed. Willard was facing a new kind of enemy and only thinking could help. He frowned. ‘It’s a shame we aren’t able to see the documents that Arthur Martin collected.’

‘Yes.’

‘But, you know, if I had been Arthur, worried that somebody was going to start cutting up rough, I’m not sure I’d have left anything important just laying around. Especially not here.’

‘I agree.’ Something in Rosalind’s tone of voice made Willard look sharply at her.

‘You think so too? You thought so that time you came to burglarise me?’

‘Yes. Sorry.’

‘Why didn’t you say so?’

‘This is a whole new game. I’m not sure what the rules are.’

Willard bit his lip, not happy with Rosalind’s reticence. There were times when she seemed very warm and friendly, other times when he felt almost patronised. ‘Well, I think you might have said something,’ he muttered sulkily. ‘I mean, we’re either in this together or we’re not.’