‘And the exceptions?’
‘Some of them have taken their precious principles straight up into heaven.’
‘Yes.’ Willard gulped, still not entirely used to Powell Lambert’s approach to business.
‘And some of them we’re working on. We can’t just go into town with a couple of Tommy guns, like we could in Chicago. There’s not a lot of homicide round here. People get kind of upset about it. But we apply pressure. A broken leg here. A fire there. I wouldn’t say we got ’em licked, but we got ’em hemmed in, defensive. The town’s dying to be quite honest with you. Another few years and there’ll be nothing much there, ’cept for poor folks on our payroll. Meantime, we keep an eye on the main troublemakers. If they start to kick up stink, we’ll go do what we gotta do.’
They continued talking. Detail. Detail. Detail. Modern industrial organisation and fanatical attention to detail was what kept Powell Lambert fifteen miles out ahead of the chasing pack. Willard was searching in his questions. Mason was efficient and thorough in his answers. Eventually, Willard reached out for his glass of rum, found it empty, and stood up.
‘It’s a fantastic business unit you have here. I’m impressed.’
Mason grinned. ‘You haven’t even heard the best of it. This bit’ll really crack you up.’
‘Yes?’
‘You wanna guess who I’ve got flying observation for me?’
‘Who?’
‘Go on. Guess.’
‘How should I know? Charlie Chaplin. Shoeless Joe. Jack Dempsey. Mary Pickford.’
‘He’s here now. Out there. Fixing up his engine. A pal of yours.’
‘A pal of mine?’
‘Uh-huh.’
Willard shook his head. A friend of his? He doubted it.
‘Rockwell.’
‘Rockwell? Captain Rockwell? The guy who…?’
‘Yeah. The guy you flew with. The guy who shot down around two million Krautheads.’
Mason grinned like he was training to wrap a smile right around the back of his head. Willard knew he was expected to respond with something similar. But he didn’t.
‘Out there?’
‘Right there, out on the landing field, unless he’s done already. You wanna go along, say hi?’
Willard was about to let out an appalled ‘No!’ when he realised that Mason had been joking. The precise connection between Marion and New York was unknown to anyone except Mason, and possibly also Frank Lambaugh in Cuba.
But Willard’s feelings were still in tumult. Having been standing, he sat back down. His hands gripped the side of the cane armchair so tightly it began to creak. He had one of those episodes, where the world suddenly goes buzzy and distant, where it feels like you’re seeing things from down the end of a long, dark tube. Leaning forwards and with deliberate emphasis on every word, he said, ‘You cannot use Captain Rockwell to fly for you.’
Mason laughed. Sure this kid had theoretical responsibility in New York, but he, Mason, was the man who ran things. ‘He’s a good guy. You oughta know that.’
‘Captain Rockwell is one of the best men in the world. That’s why you can’t use him.’
Willard wasn’t even quite sure why he was saying what he was saying. Was it that he didn’t trust Rockwell’s motives? Or was it that he didn’t want one of the few true heroes of the last war to be sullied by contact with a grubby reality? He didn’t know, he didn’t care. He just knew he didn’t want Rockwell within a hundred miles of Marion. The buzzy feeling had gone, but he still felt hot discs glowing high up on each cheek.
‘He’s OK,’ Mason persisted.
‘So you say.’
‘He never even wanted to join us. I practically had to go on my knees.’
‘Maybe he just wanted to see you on your knees.’
‘And we tested him. He came through two hundred per cent.’
‘Tested him?’
‘We gave him an opportunity to blab to the cops. Encouraged him. Did everything we could to make him.’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘We offered a little bit of carrot, then a little bit of stick. I’m sorry. I know you like the guy.’
Willard jerked his mind away from Mason’s ‘little bit of stick’.
‘And?’
‘He didn’t say nothing. Not a word. He’s probably the best value guy on our payroll.’
‘You said you had two planes. Who flies the other one?’
‘Aw, now this bit I don’t like so much. We got a girl, would you believe it? Rockwell insisted on her. She can fly some, so it seems. Our freighter captains think the world of her.’
‘I don’t like it.’ Willard’s watch ticked loudly on his wrist. He thought of Rosalind. He needed to catch the next train down the coast if he were to arrive at Palm Springs first thing tomorrow. He moved restlessly in his chair. ‘It stinks.’
‘It’s working a million dollars.’
‘Can’t you get some other fliers?’
‘Why? Why would I? Besides, you’ll know more about this than me, but it ain’t so easy flying out over the ocean, is it? One of these days, one of those airplanes is gonna fall out of the sky and make a big splash. Not to mention the storms we get down here.’
‘Well, they aren’t going to fly in bad weather, are they?’
‘They do.’
‘They do?’
‘Yeah. All except the worst.’
‘Even the girl?’
‘Yeah, her too.’
Willard fidgeted some more. ‘D’you watch them?’
‘Yeah. Some.’
‘That’s not good enough. Jesus Christ! This is Captain Rockwell you’re dealing with.’ Rockwell had shot down nineteen German machines. He’d been able to do that by being invisible when he wanted to be, lethal when he didn’t. ‘I don’t care what it costs, we need to watch him.
Twenty-four hours a day. See where he goes, who he sees, what he does. Everything.’
‘You wanna do that, you’d better get your insurance department involved. We normally only handle the little stuff ourselves.’
‘No!’ Willard’s answer was explosive.
‘No?’
‘No.’ Willard repeated the word more quietly this time, surprised by the force of his own reactions. ‘I want to keep this as quiet as we can. If we get the insurance men involved, we may find it hard to get them uninvolved.’
Mason nodded. It was a reason he could sympathise with. ‘OK.’
‘And you’ve got guards on the office buildings now? I mean, if he’s here at night…’
‘Sure. Least, I send a guy around every hour or so. We’ve never had a problem…’
‘Every hour? That’s nowhere near enough. I want two men around the perimeter all night. I want another man inside. And a fourth guy to prowl around and check that those three are doing their job. This is Rockwell you’ve got outside.’
‘This isn’t the first night he’s been here, not by a long stretch.’
‘Then you’d better hope he hasn’t taken advantage before now.’
‘The doors are all locked. We’re strict about who gets keys.’
Willard puffed scornfully at the idea that his old commander might be stopped by a set of locks. He wouldn’t budge until Mason had picked up the phone and given the necessary orders.
Willard nodded. ‘And his phone? His home telephone? You can listen in on it, I assume?’
‘Sure…’ Mason’s tone was uncertain.
‘Sure? What does that mean? Yes or no?’
‘He don’t exactly have a home phone. He lives in a shack behind the airplane hangar. There’s a phone in there, though, and we listen to that… He lives kind of rough for a guy on his income.’
‘Oh, and that gives you a lot of reassurance about his motives, does it?’
‘He’s bought his parents their farm back from the bank. Every month it’s a new tractor, or a harvester, or whatever. I guess maybe the guy plans to make his bundle then retire there.
’
‘Sure. I can just see Captain Rockwell planting string beans and going to bed happy.’
The two men stared each other out. Willard was, in theory, the boss. Mason was twenty years older and a million times more experienced. At last, Mason grunted.
‘OK. You want us to track him, I guess we can sort something out.’
‘Good.’ Willard relaxed. ‘And don’t trust him. No matter what. Don’t trust him. He’s a pursuit pilot, remember. One of the very, very best. If you let him get close, close enough so you can see him, then it’s too late. By that point, you’re already dead.’
72
They hadn’t done it, hadn’t got close.
Abe had got inside the office building, but he hadn’t taken two paces inside before there was a repeated owl call behind him – the agreed warning signal from Pen – and Abe himself heard the tread of a guard further on down the block. He’d left the building ultra-cautiously, blessing the dark night that surrounded them. He found Pen and the pair of them waited outside for two hours, watching the block, waiting for an opportunity to enter safely. But the building was always guarded. Tightly, seriously guarded. The weird thing was that, inexplicably, it seemed as though security had just been radically tightened; literally that night, that hour almost. There seemed an extra tension, an extra sharpness in the movement of the guards.
Eventually they gave up and crept away into the shelter of some thick scrub.
‘Sorry to ask,’ said Abe, ‘but I think it might be a good idea if you lay down and kind of messed yourself up a little.’
‘You want me to …?’ Pen began to ask, then she realised what he meant. ‘Oh.’
She lay on her back in the dirt and rolled around until her hair and clothes were muddied up with dirt and leaves. Abe knelt down and got dirt on his elbows and knees. They both undid some buttons. The darkness hid Pen’s face, which was blushing hotly.
‘Sorry to ask,’ said Abe, ‘only if they wonder where we’ve been, then –’
‘Right. You’re right. Don’t worry.’
Embarrassed, they made their way to the boarding house which Mason operated for themselves and the freighter crews and anyone else who passed through Marion without staying long. As the booze volumes had increased, Mason had increasingly avoided bringing any gambling business into the town, but a couple of villas still housed gaming rooms, and there was a beat of loud gramophone music and alcohol-fuelled laughter from some of the doors they passed. When they reached the boarding house, they stood outside and brushed some of the dirt away, as any furtive couple would have done. As Abe swept the dust from Pen’s back, bottom and hair, he realised that, having almost never touched her before today, he had now touched her twice in one evening: the first time in the tool shed when she’d put her hand on his shoulder out of sympathy for his feelings and kept it there, with tears damp in her eyes; and now this. Her body felt shockingly slender, shockingly warm. It felt like the most intimate thing he’d ever done.
Ten days later, they hadn’t bottomed out the mystery of the sudden acceleration in security. Brad Lundmark heard from someone that there had been a visitor in town that night, an out-of-towner but not a gambler, an important person, apparently. But Mason had visitors often enough. Whoever the vistor had been, he’d gone again almost straight away and the heightened security remained. Brad had made a couple more visits to Mamie and Suky, begging iced tea and cake off them and allowing them, in exchange, to treat him as some kind of exotic pet. Brad said he was sure the two girls looked after all Marion’s key paperwork. He said if the accounts and the payroll existed anywhere, they’d be in that office. Brad himself had offered more than once to investigate further, but Abe, Pen and Hennessey were all unanimous about refusing to let the kid place himself in any further danger. The boy still did odd jobs for Mason, but most of the time now he was back in Brunswick, looking after the tin Lizzies and battered De Sotos that crept through the door of the garage with steaming radiators or tattered brake pads.
But meantime, a piece of much brighter news.
That night in the tool shed had changed something for Abe. When before he had been reluctant to share, he now seemed, not eager exactly, but willing to try. He and Arnie had some big demonstration planned. It involved Abe’s collection of castings, and, though Pen knew Arnie knew more than she did, they both knew that Abe had kept the biggest secret from them both.
They stood now in the cool green shade of the water tank.
Arnie had rigged up some complex arrangement of hoses, tanks and pumps which Pen didn’t understand. At the bottom of the big tank, there was a chute leading down to a secondary tank beneath. A dozen of Abe’s precious models sat on the grass, like a combat squadron in miniature. Arnie smacked a thick coil of rubber hose into an outlet valve then stood back.
Abe looked at Pen. ‘Ready?’
‘Ready.’
‘OK, now this is a water tunnel. A poor man’s wind tunnel. See this?’ He picked up one of his castings and handed it to Pen. ‘Recognise it?’
After a hard day battling headwinds the day before, Pen’s arms were tired and the little model felt heavy. But the shape of the plane was unmistakable.
‘Of course. This is my Curtiss racer.’
‘Right. And what you’ve got there is a scale model, exact to one part in twenty. Now watch.’
Abe took the model and fixed it on two steel pins in the empty water chute. The plane’s nose faced uphill as though attempting to fly up the chute. Then Arnie released the sluice gate. Water ran down the chute in an even, unbroken stream, completely submerging the little model plane. Abe produced a surgical needle filled with red ink.
‘Watch.’
As he spoke he held the tip of the needle down into the water and injected a stream of ink into the water flowing around the nose. The line of ink flowed completely straight and unbroken, then caught just a little around the nose, before evening out and moving on down the airplane fuselage.
‘That’s probably the nicest nose shape out of the planes we’ve been looking at. No turbulence. Minimal drag. Glenn Curtiss always was a genius. But now look at this. The wing-struts.’
He moved the needle and now injected the ink so that it flowed down towards one of the struts connecting the upper wing to the lower one. Once again, the ink moved in a dead straight line until it hit the plane. And then something strange happened. The ink fluttered, eddied and swirled around the wing-strut. Twists and curls became visible in the water. Behind the little airplane, the water became filled with murky pink.
‘Ain’t that horrible?’ said Hueffer, who was crouching over the chute like an anxious hen. ‘The poor old engine’s gotta fight all that turbulence. It’s the same with every strut. And this plane’s a good ’un, mind you. The best biplane we’ve looked at.’
‘Yes. You can feel that,’ said Pen slowly. ‘Flying her for real, I mean. There’s a…’ she didn’t know how to phrase it. The knowledge was in the tips of her fingers, the tremble of the fuselage as the plane banked into a curve. ‘I don’t know how to say it, but that turbulence there, that drag, you can feel it when you fly her. Probably just as well. It’s the only thing that slows her down.’
‘Right,’ said Abe, ‘only what if you wanted to build for distance?’
‘Distance? She’s not really that type of plane. She’s…’
She stopped. Of course her little racer wasn’t built for range. In order to get range you needed big fuel tanks. But big fuel tanks needed big wings. Big wings needed big engines. And big engines meant the whole plane had to be scaled up. Her clean lines would be lost. And half the extra fuel capacity would be wasted in battling the drag which the need for greater fuel capacity had itself created.
‘I don’t get it.’ Then, pointing to the water chute, which was now closed off with the little model airplane already steaming dry, she added, ‘Now this I get. Water tunnels, wind tunnels. They’re telling you something which in a way you already know from flying it.
I mean, it tells you in a more useful way. But where it takes you, what the purpose is…’
She shook her head a second time. Abe lifted the little racer off its stand and cradled it, stroked it, running his hand always in the direction of air flow, nose to tail, leading edge to trailing edge. She realised that whenever he handled his models, he always touched them like that, feeling their shape the way the wind felt it.
‘You want to know where it takes us?’
‘Uh-huh.’
Arnie stopped and stared too. He, after all, had known the mechanical point of Abe’s castings, but not the real point: not the point that had absorbed Abe’s energies for so long.
‘Orteig,’ said Abe. ‘Orteig is where it takes us.’
Pen stared. She stared at Abe, at Arnie, at the model plane, at the water chute. And then she got it. She really got it.
73
On 14 June 1919, two British aviators, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown, climbed into the cockpit of their modified Vickers Vimy biplane. The Vickers was a monster. It was a monster in terms of size, but also in terms of ugliness. The giant fuel load required a huge two-tier wingspan supported by a whole cat’s cradle of struts and wires. The big ugly beast was powered by a pair of 360 horsepower Rolls Royce Eagle VIII engines.
The two men took off.
Flying east from Newfoundland, over the Atlantic, bound for the Irish coast.
In good conditions, the venture would have been crazy. Little more than a fortnight earlier, a trio of US navy airplanes, backed by radio, air-sea rescue, refuelling stops, and more than a hundred ships, had attempted to fly from Newfoundland to Portugal. Of the three planes, only one had made it. Alcock and Brown would attempt the flight, non-stop, without radio, without air-sea rescue, without naval support.
And the conditions weren’t good, they were awful.
The majority of the flight was spent flying blind, in a murderous combination of darkness, foul weather and fog. At one point, a build-up of ice on the wings was so bad that one of the two men had to climb out onto the wing in the full rip of a hundred-mile-an-hour gale and hack the potentially lethal ice away from the plane. To add to everything else, halfway across the ocean, the airspeed indicator failed, seriously increasing the risk of a dangerous stall.
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