Glory Boys (26 page)

Everyone nodded again, but more slowly this time. Bosse’s offer was appropriate, of course, but it didn’t necessarily amount to a lot. Marion was so remote, so back-of-beyond, that a single stranger would be instantly noticed. This case wasn’t going to be about manpower, it would be about guile and invisibility.

Then Abe spoke for the first time. He cleared his throat before speaking, but even then his voice came over hoarse.

‘The evidence, Jim. What d’you figure you’ll need?’

‘We been thinking hard about that, Captain. Everything we need’s in a list right here.’

He took an envelope from his pocket, handed it over. The sunshine, filtering through the dappled willow shade, struck the envelope and made it seem implausibly bright and white against the dusty world beyond. Abe took the envelope, opened it, and read slowly. When he was done, he folded the last sheet and put them all back in the envelope. He said nothing.

‘Well?’ said Bosse. ‘What d’you reckon?’

‘It’s a lot, Jim. It’s one heck of a lot you’re asking.’

‘It is. But you folks are hunting bear. You’d better shoot to kill.’

The taxman was right. Prosecuting the Marion gangsters was dangerous. Prosecuting them without convicting them would be lethal. For a few moments, silence reigned, so absolute that a single cricket chirping near Pen’s foot was almost raucous in its intensity.

‘You figure you can do it?’ asked Bosse.

Abe put the envelope in his pocket. He wasn’t smiling, wasn’t nodding, wasn’t anything.

‘I don’t know. We’ll just have to see.’

53

In July 1918, Willard was halfway through a patrol over German territory when he experienced a small problem with his starboard ailerons. The plane was entirely flyable, but it was a rule of Rockwell’s to pull back any plane that wasn’t in perfect condition. So, dipping his wings in apology to the formation leader, Willard pulled around and headed for home.

He came close enough to his aerodrome to see its long oval of sun-bleached grass, pale against the surrounding farmland. But, before putting in to land, he saw something else: a clumsy German observation plane, a two-seater Albatross of a 1917 vintage, perhaps even a relic from 1916; fat and easy prey for Willard’s modern Spad.

There followed a short but furious chase. But the battle had only one likely outcome. Willard outsped and outmanoeuvred the enemy plane. He locked his nose onto the enemy’s tail and pulled his trigger.

Nothing happened. Aside from a dull click, nothing happened. The gun had jammed. Instinctively, Willard pulled out his jam-hammer to knock at the gun barrel. The instinct was an obvious one, but in this instance nearly lethal. The Albatross was close enough to see everything. The jammed gun, the defenceless plane. The German did what any pilot would have done. He pulled his Albatross around in a long loop and made straight for Willard, intending to fire into him at point-blank range. It was the worst moment of Willard’s aerial career.

The worst and also the best.

Because Willard cleared his gun with the first blow of his hammer. He was so surprised he sat back in his seat, shocked at his sudden brilliant luck. He waited for the Albatross to get in range, then sent a long three-second burst of bullets straight into the machine’s nose. The Albatross folded into a mass of flame. Willard could still remember pulling back hard on the stick to pass above the burning aircraft, feeling the scorch of air and the sudden uprush of black smoke.

And the incident had taught him something. That luck and unluck can be hard to tell apart. That from time to time, disaster is the closest possible thing to victory.

And perhaps it was like that now.

The more Willard thought about it, the more he felt that, far from implying danger, Powell’s Mafia-style communication implied something else – maybe something good.

Here was the first point. Whatever it was that had sent Arthur Martin to the grave and Charlie Hughes to jail, the secret reached all the way to Ted Powell.

Here was the second point. Powell had no compunction about murder. If Powell wanted to have Willard murdered, he’d do so without a second thought.

And that led to the good part. Powell didn’t want Willard dead. What’s more, his gift of the files suggested he didn’t even care if Willard succeeded in busting Powell Lambert’s secret. He might care a lot about what Willard did with that information, but the information itself was not forbidden.

So Willard acted.

First he went back to the grim state penitentiary where Charlie Hughes was held. Hughes was thinner now. His jaunty carelessness had been replaced by something older, unhappier, more broken.

‘Oh, Will-o! Hey there. Gosh, thanks.’

Willard shoved a cake across the steel table. Willard hadn’t really thought about what to bring and the prison guards had had a merry time probing the cake with a screwdriver to check there was nothing concealed within. They’d only stopped once the entire cake had been mashed to a pulp. There was nothing left now but a mass of broken crumbs and browning marzipan.

Willard tried beginning with the usual small talk. Only what the hell do you talk about with a convict? How’s the food? Worse than shit. How’s the view? Kinda samey. How’s the company? Great. Varied. Fun. A little bit violent, to be sure. A wee bit inclined to see the little guy with the glasses as the one to pick on, the one it’s fun to punch hard in the stomach for no reason – but, hey, it’s new. You live and learn. Hughes tried to grin, but looked as if he was about to cry.

Willard cut things short.

‘Listen, Charlie, I came to ask you something.’

‘Sure, Will-o. Anything.’

‘That day outside the library, when I broke things up between you and McVeigh, I assumed that he was threatening you. Intimidating you.’

Hughes put his hand to his face, as though remembering the past was difficult for him. ‘No, not Leo. It was sort of funny that. We laughed about it afterwards.’

‘But somebody was threatening you. You already had a hint of … of all of this.’

‘Not Leo. He was … he was protective. He tried to warn you. He thought maybe you took it the wrong way. He can be kind of… I don’t know … heavy with things.’

He can look like a thick-as-shit footballing ape, thought Willard, without quite saying so.

‘Then who? I need to know, Charlie.’

Again that gesture. That hand to the face. That look as though the past was a distant country, half forgotten.

Hughes shook his head. ‘I can’t say. I’m out of it now. I’m sorry.’

But Willard had enough. There were two camps in the trade finance group. There was the Ronson-Claverty axis. And there had been the McVeigh-Hughes axis. If McVeigh wasn’t connected with the violence done to Arthur Martin and Charlie Hughes, then Ronson almost certainly was. Willard felt like laughing at his own stupidity.

‘Just one last thing, Charlie. The twentieth floor. A part of it is closed off. Do you know why?’

‘The twentieth floor?’ The little man’s eyes expanded as though he was having trouble remembering a world more extensive than a few square yards of concrete, a few square feet of bars. ‘The twentieth floor?’

‘Yes. It probably doesn’t matter. Ted Powell told me it contained lifting machinery to drive the elevators. Only it doesn’t. The elevators run all the way to the twenty-fourth and the lifting machinery is operated from the basement. Just a small point, but I went down there to check. I got the maintenance janitor to show me around.’

‘You did? Gee. I guess I’d always thought the lifting machinery must be up above. I guess I hadn’t thought about it much. The basement. Really!’

Hughes’ blank little face plainly had no idea what Willard was talking about. If anything his air of desolate surprise had intensified. Willard concluded that Hughes knew nothing of the twentieth-floor mystery. It was possible that Powell himself had been confused – only Willard doubted it. He doubted that Ted Powell was confused by anything much at all.

He took his leave from Charlie Hughes and went back to work. He had got into the habit of lingering by Annie’s desk at around the time she was due to distribute her hated manila files. And one day he got lucky. Of Arthur Martin’s four sellers, the largest and busiest was the Canadian company, Northern Furs and Hides. Every few weeks, another shipment of animal pelts came down from the frozen north. However regular the transactions seemed, Arthur Martin had been suspicious and Willard was determined to find out why. He slipped the file from the stack.

‘Bits of dead animal,’ he commented. ‘Charming.’

‘Which one?’ said Annie, in her businesslike voice. ‘Northern Furs? That’s for Iggy, actually.’

Willard undid the tape and looked inside the file. ‘Ha! Not just any old dead animal. There’s mink here, Annie. Arctic fox. Ermine. What do you fancy?’

‘Oh, don’t be silly. Anyway, like I say, Iggy –’

‘You want your mink from Iggy, not me? I think not. I shall work on this file and, if I possibly can, I shall extract a mink coat for you as my commission.’

And as Willard took the file, he heard Powell’s words again, stronger than ever before. ‘
You have your chance, Thornton, you have it now.’

54

Abe lost height, until he was skimming just fifty feet over the ocean waves. He throttled down, so his speed was cruising only five or ten miles an hour above stalling speed. The men on the bridge of the ship, the Cuban-flagged SS
Carmen
, were gathered in a tight knot, watching the fly-by.

Abe frowned a little. He needed to communicate directly with the ship’s captain. The cluster of men on the bridge made it impossible to tell who was who. But never mind. This was a new procedure; new ships, new lookout system, new codes. They’d learn. Abe unfastened a paddle from its position tied down to the cockpit wall. The paddle was about the size of a tennis racket and had two sides, one green, one red. Abe showed the green side to the group on the bridge, code for All Clear. There was jostling on the bridge, some clapping, some waving, a couple of raised thumbs. They were meant to show an answering signal, a white flag indicating message received, but never mind; things would improve.

Abe flew back to the coast, his DH plane,
Havana Sue,
easily outstripping the slow booze-laden freighter. Abe had already checked out the Okefenokee river, its twisting channels, the sandbanks and the mangroves. The river was clear of the Coastguard; so was the sea beyond; so was the coast north and south for forty miles. But Abe stayed alert. He continued to fly guard as the freighter chugged towards the shore, twisted up the sluggish green Okefenokee, then moored alongside Marion’s dirty concrete quay. A dockside crane sprang into action. Pallet-loads of booze began to sway up from the hold.

Up above, Abe let Sue laze around on the thermal updrafts, spiralling like a bird of prey. He loved his new aircraft, which was a pilot’s dream, the perfect combination of strength and responsiveness. Even now, as he worked, part of his mind was singing like a bird, with the de Havilland’s thumping music providing orchestra and chorus.

But another part of his mind – the more active part – was engaged in an altogether different activity: one that Bob Mason didn’t know about and wouldn’t have liked much if he had.

Beneath the fuselage was a movable panel about five inches square, stamped
OIL VENT DO NOT OBSTRUCT
. But the panel wasn’t a vent and it had nothing to do with oil. The door of the panel was opened via a lever in the cockpit. Behind the little door was a lens. Behind the lens was a Kodak camera. The first shot on each roll of film was always the same: the front page of the local newspaper. Every other shot was taken by Abe in flight over Marion. He photographed the freighter, the booze, the quayside, the loading of the booze into the railcars.

The first item on Bosse’s list of requests for evidence had been the simplest: ‘
Evidence of alcohol importation activity; dates; quantities, types of liquor; method of importation
.’

When each roll of film was finished, Abe extracted it from the camera, wrapped it in cotton wadding and dropped it in Hennessey’s backyard. When Hennessey made his next trip into Brunswick, a man from Bosse’s outfit was there to collect it. Each film could therefore be reliably dated to a short period in between the date of the newspaper headline in the first photo and the film’s arrival in Brunswick. The dating method was rigorous enough for use in a court of law.

Over in Washington, Bosse was beginning to build quite a collection: day by day, freighter by freighter, flight by flight.

55

Willard was annoyed.

‘Look at this,’ he complained, laying a new black leather glove on the black fur trim of his brand-new winter overcoat.

‘What? It looks all right to me,’ said Rosalind.

‘Well, all right maybe, but not good. I mean the fur on the coat isn’t properly black, is it? It looked black enough in the shop, but really, when you put it together as an outfit…?

‘I think it looks nice.’

‘Well, yes, on its own but, you see, you have to think of the overall effect.’

Willard was in Rosalind’s dressing room. In the hall downstairs, his suitcase was packed and ready. In his coat pocket, Willard had train tickets booked all the way through to Montreal. His plan was a bold one – frighteningly bold, in Rosalind’s opinion. He was travelling to Canada in order to intercept one of the suspect shipments of furs and hides. Arthur Martin had lost his life investigating the paper trail of one such transaction. Willard was proposing to investigate the shipment itself, all alone, hundreds of miles from the nearest help.

As Willard continued to fuss, Rosalind was quietly astonished. In two days’ time, her lover might be fighting for his life, might be dead or dying, and all he cared about was his stupid coat collar.

‘Aren’t you scared?’

‘Scared?’ Willard had his collar pulled down so he could scrutinise it better and for a moment didn’t understand her question. Then he did. He patted the collar back into place and said, ‘Well, I guess. The trick is not to worry too much. Fellows who did that in the war never managed for long. It runs the nerves ragged, you know. Besides, I don’t mean to upset things. I certainly don’t mean to end up wrapped around a maple tree.’