The money was welcome. Except for a short while on the racing circuit, Abe had never earned a whole lot. The income he’d been receiving from booze – first from De Freitas, now from Mason – was the best he’d ever earned. Most of it he was sending to his parents, whose Kentucky farm had been sliding inexorably into the hands of the bank. Digging them out of debt would be the best possible way of spending his cash.
And yet, the whole thing nevertheless left him uneasy. He was taking Mason’s money. He was allying himself with an organisation for whom bullying, thuggishness and murder were a regular part of business. And that would be fine, if Abe were certain that he meant to do what he could to smash Marion and save Independence. But he wasn’t.
He hadn’t been before, when he’d said goodbye to Brad Lundmark on the beach outside Brunswick. He wasn’t now that he was already halfway inside the organisation. Most of him still wanted to quit. One small but stubborn part of him refused to let go of the picture of Brad Lundmark’s pile of flying souvenirs, and of the boy’s mother, burned, blinded and widowed. Silently to himself, and not for the first time, Abe cursed the storekeeper’s shrewdness and persistence.
Mason inspected the pile of booze, then nodded approval. He handed four hundred bucks to Abe and growled ‘Load up,’ to the driver. Then he strolled over to Abe’s living area to find himself a glass of water. On the small wooden table which served as Abe’s dining table, there was a deck of cards lying face down.
‘You a card player?’ he asked brightly, as though hoping to have located a normal human characteristic in the airman.
‘Not really.’
Abe picked up the deck, fanned it open, picked out the ace of spades. He held the card up, then flicked his hand and made the card disappear. It reappeared again, then vanished, then appeared in the other hand, then, just as Mason was sure he’d seen the card transfer back to Abe’s right hand, the ace reappeared on top of the deck.
‘Sheez!’
‘It’s all hokum,’ said Abe, inserting the ace back in the deck and shuffling. ‘As a kid, I always knew I wanted to work on engines. I worried maybe I was clumsy, so I bought a book of card tricks and made myself practise until I figured I had enough dexterity.’
‘Jeez, you take life kinda seriously, buddy.’
Abe shrugged. He fanned the pack open, holding the cards face up towards Mason. The mobster glanced, then stared. He took the pack and leafed through it one by one. The ace of spades had disappeared.
‘Where’s it gone?’
Abe ignored him. ‘Later on, I discovered that card tricks weren’t a bad way of understanding war in the air. Trickery, misdirection, concealment, deceit. They’re all transferable techniques. There were other commanders who thought that type of thing not quite “sporting”.’ Abe spoke the word in a British accent, then dropped it instantly. ‘I wouldn’t know. I never played those type of sports.’
‘Misdirection?’ queried Mason.
‘Listen, I’ve got something for you.’
He went to the office at the side of the hangar. The door, little used, had begun to stick and warp. He kicked at it, opened the door, picked a newspaper off the desk. A colony of brown-legged spiders had extended itself from an out-of-date Cuban calendar to the light fittings. Abe ignored the spiders and came out, passing the newspaper to Mason.
‘Army Air Service Gazette, huh? You think you could cut it in the army?’
Abe shrugged. ‘They still send it.’ He tapped a small news item at the bottom of the page, circled in blue. The item was a short report indicating that the army was about to sell some of its war-surplus fighter-bombers. ‘DH-4. Good plane. We’d be getting it cheap.’
‘A DH-4. They sure think up some swell names.’
‘It’s a de Havilland. A British plane, built here under licence. It’s a bomber. Fourteen thousand pound load capacity.’
‘A bomber, huh? If we ever want to drop bombs on somebody, that’d be a real good idea.’
‘Allowing for my weight and the weight of fuel, I calculate we could carry thirty-five cases of booze every day. That’d be nearly six times as much as now.’
‘Booze?’ Mason’s face looked wide-eyed and innocent. ‘Booze? No booze here I hope.’
‘You talked about a partnership. I’m not too keen on being treated like a junior employee.’
‘Junior, buddy? No way. Believe me, we think highly of you. We ain’t never had a real live fighter ace working for us before.’
‘The plane, Mason. What do you say?’
‘Say? Say to what?’ Mason raised his eyebrows. The truck driver had got the booze loaded up and was sitting in the cab, with the engine turning noisily over.
‘We buy a plane. We load her with booze. I bring her in.’
‘Booze, you’re always going on about booze.’ Mason climbed inside the truck, grabbed one of his meat pies and took a gigantic bite. ‘Peterson’s Pies,’ he mumbled. ‘Oh my, how delicious!’
The driver had the truck in gear and the clutch down. The engine was in need of tuning, and it ran too fast and too heavily.
‘Misdirection,’ said Abe. ‘It’s the art of making a person look one way when they ought to be looking the other.’
‘Huh? Back to conjuring tricks, right?’
Abe didn’t answer directly, but stood tapping the shirt pocket over his heart. Mason didn’t figure it out immediately, but then he did. His gaze dropped down to his own jacket pocket. ‘Aw, shit,’ he said, then pulled out a playing card: the ace of spades. He passed it out of the cab window and was still chuckling as the truck bounded away in a kick-back of sandy dust.
36
The mirror reflected this: a sandy-haired man, strong-jawed, very handsome, very carefully turned out in immaculate evening dress; a woman, dark-gold bobbed hair, aquamarine gown dropping hardly any distance below the knee; and in the background, a single black jazz singer, with a battered, southern, bluesy face, his eyes half-closed as he bobbed hypnotically on the melodic disorder of the four-piece band behind him. Willard paused to relish the sight, his gaze returning three times to his face for every two times it touched on Rosalind’s.
‘Best cocktails in midtown,’ he murmured, still looking in the mirror. ‘The music’s good too, you know. Don’t worry if you don’t like it at first. It’s the sort of thing –’
‘Oh, I love jazz. I listen to it whenever I can. Did you catch Mo Johnson at the Alabama Club last week? I thought –’
Rosalind’s enthusiasm turned Willard quickly off the subject.
‘Your coat,’ he said, ‘we need to check it.’
He checked her coat then steered her to a table in the dim room. He liked things modern, and how much better could it get? Himself: as handsome as anything, a beautiful woman at his side, the thrill of a speakeasy, the illegal taste of alcohol, the strange, clashing rhythms of jazz. They sat down. While Willard fussed over getting seated just right – he hated it when the chair back interfered with the proper fall of his jacket – Rosalind sat easily, cocking her head to the music. Willard got things arranged as he wanted, ordered cocktails and pretended to listen too.
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 w
ith 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.
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