Glory Boys (45 page)

‘Did you know that Arnie and I thought you were wrong? That you should have said yes to McBride in the first place? That we shouldn’t run from a job we haven’t finished?’

Now it was Abe’s turn to look shocked. It was obvious from his face that he had no idea. But Pen wasn’t done. She was sitting down, leaning forwards, crying. But her tears were strange. They fell without effort or pause, more like dry sand than salt water.

‘And you know something else? You’re wrong. About everything you think you are. You’ve spent all your life running and the person you run from, finally, is yourself. You know why you never talk about the war? Why you hardly even keep your medals, let alone remember them or honour them? It’s because those medals tell you something true about yourself and you’re too pig-headed to hear it.’

She looked up at him. Her voice, though quiet, had been perfectly composed. It hadn’t sobbed or choked or halted even once. And yet still those tears fell, falling like sand.

‘You’re not a war hero, you’re simply a hero who came to prominence in wartime. I don’t know why you can’t see that, why you don’t know that. It’s like you spend your whole life with your face turned away from the mirror. You have something remarkable. Hennessey saw that within days of getting to know you. And yet you bury it. You always have. You do now. And I guess you always will. And I’m only sorry because, I saw that thing too. I wanted to see it shine.’

There was a long silence. There seemed nothing to say in the aftermath of such a speech. Abe found a towel in the kitchen and handed it to Pen, who dried her eyes with a couple of dabs. Her face didn’t seem altered by the crying in any way. Her eyes were red, they weren’t puffy, her cheeks weren’t tight and scrunched up.

After a long time, Abe said, ‘And you say you’re happy to continue? To fight the mob until they’re destroyed?’

‘I told you, didn’t I?’

‘And Arnie too?’

‘Of course Arnie. He hates those bastards.’

Abe nodded, but said nothing. The room was silent, except that because every window was filled with the wide blue ocean, the silence was filled with the rhythm of the sea. Eventually he seemed to emerge from his trance.

‘OK,’ he nodded: half-question, half-statement. ‘OK.’

‘I’d best go see Arnie. Let him know plans have changed.’

‘Sure.’

‘I’ll call McBride from a drugstore as well. Tell him.’

‘Yes. You need to do that.’

‘We’ll carry on. I’ve got some ideas.’

‘I’ll bet you do.’

‘Ideas which maybe involve you making a little career change.’

‘If you like.’

‘OK then.’

‘OK.’

Abe left the room, so quietly he could have been a ghost.

94

‘On fire?’

‘Yeah, on fire. I just told you.’

‘Bad?’

‘Jeez, Thornton, the plane looked like it was going to come down as a lump of charcoal.’

‘But he took off again?’

‘Sure. He had to fix it up though.’

‘How long did that take?’

‘I don’t know. An hour. Maybe an hour and a half.’

‘What did he say was wrong?’ Willard pursued Mason relentlessly.

‘Don’t know. Something to do with the oil.’

‘What to do with the oil?’

‘How the hell should I know?’

‘How far out was he when the fire started?’

‘A few miles. Maybe eight, maybe ten.’

‘How high?’

‘High?’

‘Yes, how high was he?’

‘No idea. He was just a teeny little speck.’

‘If you’d been underneath and he’d waved at you, would you have seen him wave?’

‘No. Don’t think so.’

‘If he’d waved something large, a bath towel say, would you have seen him then?’

‘I guess, maybe. Don’t reckon he was going to spend a lot of time waving bath towels though.’

Willard ignored Mason’s deflection. At a rough guess, he’d say Abe must have been higher than two thousand feet, lower than eight thousand. Five thousand seemed like a fair estimate.

‘OK. I want to know how he came in. Everything you remember.’

‘Burning. On fire. Like a hog on a spitroast.’

‘But his flight. Describe his flight. Was it steady or unsteady?’

‘Unsteady. He was diving down, then looping up. One time it looked like he was gonna come down on the warehouse roof.’

‘Was he side-slipping? Is that what he was doing?’

‘That like the foxtrot?’

‘Side-slipping … it’s kind of when you slip sideways through the air, nose into the wind and the leading wing slightly down. It’s a technique you can use to keep any flames from blowing back from the engine into the cockpit.’

‘I didn’t see no flames.’

‘Did you see any side-slipping?’

‘Not sure. Don’t think so.’

‘How about the landing? You see that?’

‘Not me, no, but I heard about it. He pretty near rammed a gasoline truck.’

‘Apart from that, how did he land? Apart from the fire, that is. Did he come in straight and steady? Was it a good landing?’

There was a short pause. Willard could hear Mason swigging something – whiskey, most likely – and setting the glass back down. When he spoke again, Mason’s voice had an edge of irritation.

‘Listen, Thornton, I don’t know what your kick is here, but the way that guy brought the plane in was unbelievable. He bounced. He swerved. He virtually skidded off the end of the runway. But he came down in one piece and all he seemed to care about was getting the plane fixed up and back in the air. I got a phone call from him just now, telling me he’ll be back in time to bring in the freighter tomorrow mid-morning. That’s not just devotion to duty. He’s way beyond that. I’m sick of mistrusting the guy. He’s the best guy I’ve got, bar none. I say we let up on the poor sap.’

‘Anything strange in the engine noise?’

‘No. The engine was just fine. It was a real picnic up there. Oh, wait up, I was forgetting.
It was on fire
, I’m telling ya.’

‘I was asking about the sound.’

‘Jeez… It was up and down, just like the airplane.’

‘And he said the problem was the lubrication? He didn’t have a problem with the controls?’

‘Sure he had a problem with the controls. Must have done. The way that thing came down.’

‘But he told you it was the oil?’

‘You want me to tell you again?’

‘OK. Thanks. You’ve been helpful.’

‘You wanna tell me what’s going on?’

‘Yes, of course, as soon as I know.’

‘This got anything to do with that guy Hennessey’s laundry habits?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You think he’s up to something?’

Willard’s lips went dry. Not just his lips. His tongue, his mouth, his throat went gluey and cramped. It was the question he’d been dreading. And this time he evaded, knowing he wouldn’t be able to evade for long.

‘Keep up the surveillance. Don’t let him out of your sight.’

They signed off and hung up.

And Willard hadn’t been honest. Because he was an airman, trained by Rockwell himself. Willard knew that a real engine fire would have destroyed the plane, that Rockwell would have been lucky to get out alive. And Willard knew that Rockwell hadn’t even been afraid of fire, because if he had, he’d have side-slipped like crazy to keep the flames at bay. And as for all that stunting around – the up-down flight, the crazy landing – Willard knew that for the bullshit that it was. The plane had been just eight miles out and five thousand feet up. It had had at least partial engine power and intact controls. If Rockwell had been in real trouble, there’d have been nothing stopping him from just gliding gracefully home.

And one last thing. The day he’d been shot up, Hennessey had hung red sheets out to dry in his garden. Who did that? Who had red sheets in that part of the world? No one. No one at all. No one, who didn’t want to send a signal to a pilot flying overhead.

Willard had set his test and Rockwell had failed.

95

Abe left the apartment, his head still filled with the boom of Pen’s words. They roared in his brain like the ocean waves, which were genuinely audible now, pounding the white sand as though the stuff needed to be punished forever. Abe walked out on the beach, almost unaware of where he was, or why. The air was quiet, but what breeze there was drove the little breakers in long diagonals up the shelving beach. The rolling curl of the waves was like a long sneer, endlessly repeated. A sneer at Abe. At his self-delusions. At his long history of running.

After an hour of aimless pacing, a new thought struck him. He stopped dead, as though physically struck. For two seconds he stood there, then went racing back, up to Pen’s tall pink-fronted building, through the marble lobby, into the elevator, crunching sand into its carpet. He jammed the key into the lock and hit the button for the top floor. He couldn’t get there fast enough. The elevator car reached the top floor. The doors paused, then staggered open. Abe almost tumbled out, he was so eager.

Pen was standing eight feet away from him, in evening dress, pearls and heels, a slightly incredulous smile on her face.

‘Again?’ she said.

‘Again. I –’ His words gave up before even properly starting.

‘Yes?’

‘I –’

Pen smiled again. In heels she was the same height as him or even a little taller. They had the same strangely blue eyes, the same very tanned skin. They even had something less common than that: the same way of moving, the same quiet watchfulness. At times it could almost seem as though they were like mirror images of each other, male and female versions of the same human being. It was like that now. Something peculiar in the atmosphere made Pen look away momentarily.

When she looked back, she found Abe with a pack of cards in his hand, spread fan-wise and face-down. His eyes silently invited her to pick one. Feeling strange, not understanding why Abe had come rushing back to her apartment to play stupid tricks that she’d seen before, she was about to pick a card, when Abe’s finger, pushing from beneath the deck, slid one card out in front of the others, making it look as though the card had slid out of its own accord. As though in a trance, she took the card: the jack of spades, the black knave, a one-eyed, unlucky card.

Abe took the card and began to play with it. Pen followed the card – or not the card, but Abe’s fingers and not always even his fingers, but the places she knew she wasn’t meant to look. She followed the knave’s progress as he was palmed, switched, concealed and dropped. When Abe finished a routine, he caught her eyes. She either pointed or glanced at the location where she knew the card to be. She was right each time. She felt a mounting sense of disappointment. What did this second visit mean? Abe’s tricks looked like foolishness now, foolishness of a feeble, see-through kind.

Abe stopped again. Sadly now, Pen indicated his jacket sleeve. Abe smiled – a tiny half-smile – and shook his head. He opened his sleeve and shook it: nothing. He removed his jacket: nothing. Pen was puzzled. She’d been sure that the card had gone into the sleeve, but had she missed its coming out again? Or had she not seen what she thought she’d seen? Abe’s trickery suddenly seemed more purposeful, more pointed.

With a small nod, Abe indicated the wastebasket beneath the side-table. She stepped over and looked inside. The knave was there, face-up. It couldn’t have been there, but it was. She straightened again. She didn’t know why words had all of a sudden become forbidden, but it made sense somehow. The silence rang with significance.

The two fliers now stood facing one another. Abe had put the deck of cards down. His hands were by his sides, not moving. His face gave Pen no indication of what she was meant to do or see next. She queried him with a tiny movement of her shoulders. Abe’s mouth flickered with a smile of encouragement. Still puzzled, Pen began to shrug again, but more attentively this time. She was wearing a pearl-grey evening dress to just below the knee. The dress was rayon, but with two folds of chiffon that came down from the shoulder and met over her breasts.

And as she shrugged, the dress moved, but not quite evenly. There was a stiffness on the left-hand side, over her heart. Her mouth slightly open, and her breaths coming slow and deep, she put her hand to the area of stiffness. There was a playing card there, held in the fold of the chiffon. She couldn’t even remember him stepping close enough to reach her, let alone to slide a card inside her dress. Perhaps when she’d bent to look in the wastebin …? But she’d only made a half-step, she hadn’t bent far, she hadn’t taken her eyes off Abe for more than a second…

She removed the playing card from her dress and held it, not looking at it.

The pilot opened his hands once, stretching the fabric of his shirt over his chest. Pen saw the outline of a card in his shirt pocket, a pocket that had been empty before. He drew it out and turned it over. It was the king of hearts.

Pen’s heart was suddenly doing a hundred beats to the minute. Slowly, she turned over the card in her hand. It was the queen of hearts.

Her eyes crept up from the card to the man opposite her. His mouth and eyes were full of enquiry; full of hope; full of love. Still without words, he was asking her if she loved him still.

She nodded.

He breathed out. Relief and joy swept through him.

They came together and kissed, and the kiss was endless.

96

‘Do you have a date yet?’

The man in McBride’s office was nearing sixty, a heavy build that had run to fat, aggressive eyes locked behind thick glasses, balding. The man was McBride’s direct boss, Jim Carpenter, the Commissioner of the IRS.

‘No. No date.’

‘Aren’t you going to push?’

‘I’d push if I needed to. I don’t need to.’

‘Christ, you know, action, we need action. We’ve got a special budgetary allocation for you. We’ve given you a big title, nice office. Now, talking frankly, we gotta have scalps. Congress will want scalps. The Treasury. The press. Jesus, I want scalps.’

‘You’ll get them.’

Outside the window, Washington had become locked under a rain cloud. Grey skies were hammered down low over the city, bolted down to the horizon in every direction by drifts of rain and rags of mist. Carpenter gazed out, as though the rain was a sour joke played on him personally.