And finally he saw one last thing. Or rather, it was as though he’d always seen it and never acknowledged it. The feeling wasn’t one of discovery but of unburying. The insight was this. That the Firm was everything. Here and now, in his place of danger, poverty and over-work, Willard saw the Firm at its true worth. A beautiful complex organism which produced wealth, status and security in a world terribly short of all those commodities. Willard felt a burning eagerness to renew his life, to begin work at the Firm, learning steadily under his father’s relentless eye.
And all the time he walked. By eight that evening, he’d been wandering for almost five hours. His feet were sore. A light rain had been blowing and he had left the office hatless and coatless.
He looked around him, so distracted that he had hardly any idea where he was. He found himself in a poor part of town: East Twenty-Second and First. There were no cabs on the street, not even many cars. A vague air of poverty and menace hung like steam in the dirty alleyways, the badly lit sidewalks. He shivered, suddenly cold. He was about to strike out for Fifth Avenue and the certainty of finding a cab, when he suddenly noticed that his surroundings were familiar.
He didn’t understand why – then did. Annie Hooper lived near here. He knew this because, in the days before Rosalind, he’d dropped her home after boozy nights out with Ronson and Claverty. His feet led him to her apartment block – a tenement rich with the smell of fried food and boiled laundry.
He hesitated. He had no reason to be here. But an impulse he couldn’t define carried him up the cracked concrete steps to the door. He rang her bell. He shivered again, thought about leaving, but was too late. The door opened and there – startled and out of breath – was Annie.
‘Willard? Is that …? Come in! You’re soaked.’
‘Annie, you are sweet. I left my coat somewhere. I couldn’t find a cab. Good job you were in.’
‘Yes, isn’t it? What on earth…?’
‘Could I come up? Just until the rain passes.’
‘Of course.’
They went up. The stairs and corridors smelled of detergent and the bare electric bulbs were spaced wide apart by a stingy apartment manager. Annie let Willard into her apartment.
‘I’m sorry. It’s not exactly…’
She didn’t finish, but her meaning was obvious. She didn’t earn much and, from what little she did, she sent money to her parents in Kansas. There was enough left over for one small apartment: a bedroom which Willard didn’t see, a tiny kitchen, a sitting room just eight foot wide with an almost twelve-foot ceiling. A wide damp patch on the wall had been inadequately painted over and the room smelled strongly of old damp and new paint.
Willard sat on the only couch. There was one other chair, also a table, a radio, and (to their shared embarrassment) a washing rack with Annie’s clothes spread out on it. She cleaned them away in a sudden rush, then turned to him, blushing. The blush set him at his ease. He relaxed and pulled off his wet jacket.
‘Do you mind?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Sorry, I should have phoned or something, only…’
‘Oh, don’t worry. Sorry about the smell. They’ve just repainted.’
‘The smell’s all right… You don’t maybe have a drop of coffee in that kitchen of yours?’
‘Yes, yes, good idea, of course.’
Annie went into the kitchen to make coffee. Willard hung on the door post – the kitchen was far too small for two – and watched. Annie made the coffee, poured two cups, then, with a quick smile, opened a cupboard door and produced a flat pint-bottle of whiskey. She held it up, the fine threads of her eyebrows raised enquiringly.
Willard nodded. ‘You bet.’
Annie added the drink to their coffees, a big glug for him, a token one for her.
‘Was it all right with Powell? You took off very suddenly afterwards.’
Willard rubbed his face. ‘God, he’s a brute, isn’t he? Not gentlemanlike in the slightest. I wanted to punch him, Annie, I swear to you.’
‘Oh good, I was so worried. You just went up, then never came back. I couldn’t help thinking about poor Arthur and poor old Charlie and… Oh Willard, I am sorry, I’m probably being silly.’
She was crying.
Mostly Willard thought girls made themselves look worse by crying. It messed up their eyes, their skin, the proportions of their face. But Annie was different. Maybe because it wasn’t beauty she had, it was prettiness. Her fine brown hair, her delicate complexion, her scattering of freckles, and timid, over-expressive lips – they all somehow benefited from tears. Willard did the only thing he could do. He pulled her towards him, let her nestle against his chest, and let her cry.
‘I’m sorry, I’m being silly, I’m sorry.’
It was the signal for her to pull away. It was the signal for Willard to let her. But she didn’t move and neither did he. He just held her, by the window, near the dirty yellow light from the street, near the thin curtains and the damp walls. They stood in silence, listening to the rain.
PART THREE
Thrust
Sir George Cayley might have worked out what an airplane would look like, but he’d never got further than building a glider. Where would the power come from? In Sir George’s day, there were two main sources of power: horses and steam engines. Horses mostly didn’t fly. Steam engines were so huge and heavy, you could wrench your back just looking at them.
But that didn’t stop folk trying. In 1843, William Henson used Cayley’s research to build his Aerial Steam Carriage. The carriage looked in most respects like a modern airplane. In layout, the carriage had a fuselage slung below a monoplane wing. It had a movable tail unit, an undercarriage, a pair of wing-mounted propellers. It was, in short, an airplane. But it didn’t fly and couldn’t. Steam engines were too heavy, and there was nothing else around.
Throughout the nineteenth century, experiments continued. The first powered flight in history came about thanks to a twenty-one-year-old Frenchman, Alphonse Penaud. The aircraft in question had a wingspan of eighteen inches. Its propeller was a pair of feathers and the engine was a rubber band. On its first flight, the model plane flew a hundred and thirty feet in eleven seconds. The year was 1871.
Meantime, Cayley’s gliders were developed and improved. Stronger, lighter steam engines were built. Airplanes were constructed that could just about haul themselves from the ground. But nothing yet looked likely to crack the secret of flight.
The invention of the internal combustion engine changed all that. The petrol engine offered more horsepower for less weight. For the first time in history, thrust, the second ingredient of flight, was available on tap.
But there was no use lifting something into the air at speed, for the machine only to spin out of control and smash up. Everything now depended on the third ingredient of flight: how to control the aircraft in the air.
Across the industrialised world, in England and Germany, France and America, the race was on.
52
The man wore a dark city suit, heavy and good quality, a navy silk tie, clean shirt, good shoes. He was also young, had hair the colour of dark oak and a chin you could use for the backboard of a basketball hoop. He jabbed himself twice in the chest.
‘Now I don’t know how much you folks know about me and what I do, but I figured I oughta give myself a little bit of an introduction. My name’s Jim Bosse. I’m a Senior Investigator with the Special Investigations Unit of the Internal Revenue Service. That’s a bit of a mouthful, but perhaps you’ll understand me better if I tell you I’m a policeman, dedicated to the investigation of tax fraud against the Government of the United States. Our unit is small and it’s new. But good. And keen. And clean. Absolutely clean. We’re uncorrupted and uncorruptable.’
He stopped, then laughed. He laughed easily and when he did so, he looked more like an easy-going farmboy than a taxman. But though his eyes didn’t exactly contradict the picture, they certainly added to it. Easy-going he
might be, but if so he was also determined, also implacable.
Pen looked around to sense her companions’ reactions. She was out here – a creek-bed running by a dilapidated farmhouse in mid-Georgia, nine miles from the nearest buggy stop – with Abe and Hennessey, whom she was meeting for the first time. She felt strange being here like this. Strange to be in the presence of men who apparently couldn’t care less about her gender, only about her competence. Strange to be here in secret. Stranger still to be in the midst of a real conspiracy, a conspiracy which would kill her if it ever leaked. But neither Abe nor Hennessey showed any reaction to Bosse’s words. Was it because, as men, they were in some way accustomed to situations like this? Or was it that they felt as much as she did, but simply didn’t show it?
Bosse continued to speak.
‘Now, I’m sorry to drag y’all out here. But I figured the quieter the better, right? And the folks that own this place,’ he nodded towards the creaking, dilapidated farm, ‘are close relatives of a person I trust. They won’t gossip, won’t talk.
‘Now three or four weeks back I got a call from Captain Rockwell here. He told me what he was up to, asked if I was interested in helping. I was. Not just interested, neither. I’d say I was as eager as a gundog in a duck farm. That applies to me. It applies to one, maybe two of my colleagues. And that’s it. No one else knows. No one else will until we’re ready to move. Captain Rockwell has asked for the highest possible level of secrecy, and you fellers – and you too, ma’am – are gonna get it. You’ve got the guts to go bear-hunting, I’m gonna honour that.’
Bosse stopped, and let the silence step in. Pen glanced at Abe, who was stretched out against a fallen tree trunk, his feet warming in the sun, his face in the shade. He looked comfortable, but impassive. She could read literally nothing in his expression.
‘Now it’s probably just as well to give you folks a history lesson. A coupla years back, we noticed a guy over in South Carolina who hadn’t declared his income for the purposes of income tax. Guy name of Sullivan. We knew Sullivan made plenty of money and he sure hadn’t told us about it. Way we saw it, that was a crime.’
‘Right,’ said Pen. ‘Of course.’
He grinned at her. ‘Of course. Only Sullivan was a bootlegger. Was. Is. That’s how he makes his money.’
‘Oh!’
‘But the law says you pay tax on your income. We don’t care how he makes his money, we just care he pays us tax on it.’
‘But if he declares his income, isn’t that just like admitting his crimes? Doesn’t he have a Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself?’ Pen spoke slowly, thinking hard.
Bosse chuckled. ‘That’s what he says too, ma’am. That’s exactly the case his lawyers have put up. Only we say, phooey. He doesn’t have to tell us how he made his dough, he just has to say how much, then pay us tax on it. We don’t care if he makes his money selling booze or buttons.’
‘The case has gone to court?’
‘Not just once. Twice. The first court, the South Carolina District Court, found for us. We were right, Sullivan was wrong. So he appealed.’
‘And?’
‘Case went up a level, to the Circuit Court of Appeal, Fourth Circuit.’
‘And?’
‘Sullivan won, so we appealed.’
‘And?’
‘That’s as far as we’ve got. The Supreme Court hears the case next year, April. We’re gonna win.’
‘How can you know that? You’ve already lost one decision. Are you telling me this whole conspiracy depends on –?’ Pen stopped. She was stopped by the twinkle in Bosse’s eye, by Abe’s calm composure to her right. She realised in a flash that Abe wouldn’t have pinned his whole plan of action on a fifty-fifty court decision; that Bosse himself would hardly be likely to jump the gun. ‘What are you saying? You’ve spoken with the Supreme Court already? You’ve had indications from them?’
‘Let’s just say we’re very confident that the highest court in the land will get things right. The law’s the law, after all. We don’t want no one to incriminate themselves. We just want our tax.’
Pen let the taxman’s confidence sink in. The idea was a crazy one, of course, but anyone who still cared about America could see that organised crime was running rampant. Conventional law enforcement had almost totally failed. Despite the unrestrained homicide spree which had guzzled the city of Chicago, for instance, not one single gangster had been successfully prosecuted for murder. If the forces of law and order were to succeed, completely new approaches would need to be found. Prosecutions for tax evasion sounded unlikely but, in a way, the more unlikely the better.
Pen realised that everyone was looking at her: Abe, Hennessey, Bosse. It was as though she was being asked to give a verdict on the plan that had brought them together. She nodded slowly.
‘It’s good,’ she said. ‘I like it.’
Bosse grinned like a kid at Christmas. ‘Great. I knew you’d love it. OK. Next up. What we plan to do. How we plan to do it. First off, the aim is to gather enough evidence to prosecute all the key players in Marion for tax evasion. That’s only the start of course. As soon as everyone sees that the whole organisation is gonna fold, we’re gonna start offering deals. Time off in return for confessions. That way we’ll start to rake in evidence for the conventional type prosecutions. Liquor offences, assaults, racketeering, homicide. We want a lot of people behind bars for a long time. That’s the aim.
‘To do all that we need evidence. Hard evidence. Material we can use in court. Original documents. Copies of documents as long as the copies are witnessed and preferably notarised. Witness statements. Photographs. All that type of thing. Everyone follow me?’
The tone was getting serious now. Everyone was infected. Pen nodded gravely. So did Abe. So did Hennessey.
‘Good. How you get those things is kinda up to you. If you need extra resources, we can supply them. We can supply people to run wire taps. We can supply notaries. I guarantee you that everyone we produce will come straight outa my department. Uncorrupted and uncorruptable. That’s the deal.’
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.
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