Glory Boys

by Harry Bingham

  And the two girls had a system. Incoming paperwork went straight into a wire basket that sat on the filing cabinet closest to the door. When they were ready – and they weren’t girls who liked to rush – they unloaded the basket and went to work. And Abe got into a system too. When he entered the room, he put whatever he was carrying down on top of the basket. When he left again he picked it up and took it away.

  ‘I’d best get on,’ he said.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Thanks for the coffee.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘Well then…’

  Abe reached down and picked up his papers. Not just his, but those below as well. He didn’t do it with any secrecy, he just did it.

  He walked back to his office, leaving his door wide open, so anyone at all could just walk in. He began work on his flight logs. The papers he’d taken from Mamie and Suky lay on the table in front of him. It was the weekly payroll charts, written out in neat black ink. The papers lay close enough that Abe could see them, but he wasn’t copying them. If anyone had happened to enter his office at that moment, he’d have looked the picture of innocence: a man bent over his work, a man who’d accidently picked up some tedious little papers that didn’t belong to him.

  And that was all they’d see. Even if they ransacked the office, examined every shred of paper, if they’d strip-searched Abe and ripped his plane, his possessions, and everything else into minuscule fragments, they wouldn’t come across so much as a comma that belonged to the incriminating accounts.

  Because the chances are they’d be looking in the wrong places for the wrong things. They wouldn’t even know to keep their eyes out for the only things they should have been looking for. Things, such as:

  – A cotton thread about five feet long running from Abe’s hand, casually tapping against the side of his chair, to the window outside.

  – A bent paperclip, tied to the end of the thread, but only loosely tied, so that one short, sharp tug from Abe would dislodge the clip and send it tumbling to the ground.

  – A couple of loose wires, each showing about a quarter inch of bare copper, part of a bundle of cables that ran down from the roof. The paperclip was hooked around one of the wires, so that every time Abe’s hand tapped on the thread, the wire touched the other one, completing an electrical circuit.

  – A length of drainpipe on the roof, invisible from the ground, aimed like an artillery piece up the hill towards Independence.

  – And finally this: an electric light bulb, concealed inside the drainpipe, that came on only when the circuit was closed. Because of the length of pipe shielding it, the bulb’s glow was completely invisible to anyone closer at hand.

  Plus, of course, if the people looking had been almost super-humanly smart, they’d have guessed the final part of the jigsaw: a lanky storekeeper up in Independence, sitting at his bedroom window with a telescope, steadily pointed at the winking light down on a Marion rooftop. And Hennessey’s good at this game by now. The Rudiments of Morse Code is no longer needed. The storekeeper’s right hand copies Abe’s message as fluently as if he were copying from a sheet of newsprint.

  But this isn’t newsprint that he’s copying. He’s copying Marion’s most secret financial documents. These are the documents which may one day clinch the case for the prosecution. The documents will prove that Marion is a business; that the business is vastly profitable; that the people who draw salary or profit from the business are earning easily enough to be liable for federal income tax. All the other information that Abe and Pen have so far collected hasn’t been worth as much as this. And it’s being steadily copied.

  Letter by letter. Line by line. Incriminating page by incriminating page.

  85

  It was late afternoon. Willard had drunk half a bottle of wine over lunch and was feeling sleepy. But sleep would have to wait. He had wedding plans to sort out, endless Firm-related business to sort out, a marital home to buy and get ready.

  And then there was Rockwell.

  Mason was watching the man constantly now. He had put his best men on it. And so far they’d found nothing. Not a string bean. Mason’s latest report covered everything: movements, conversations, timings, dates, items searched. As ever, the man looked clean. Willard studied the report, then phoned Mason for their daily briefing. They went through various items of business, before the conversation turned, as ever, to Rockwell.

  ‘The guy’s clean, Thornton,’ Mason complained with a sigh. ‘He’s actually a nice guy. I reckon it’s about time we laid off him. I’m getting kinda sick of it.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Willard wanted to believe Mason, but he also felt the pressure of his father’s scrutiny, his own burning desire to prove his capability. ‘As soon as we’re sure.’

  ‘We are sure. He’s sitting three doors away from the most secret papers we’ve got. He’s not made any attempt to copy them, leastways not unless he’s writing in invisible ink on invisible paper. The guy doesn’t even keep his door closed.’

  ‘But he asked for an office, right? When he had a whole house to work in?’

  ‘Right. Only he’s not the luxury villa type of guy. You know that.’

  ‘Right. So why does he work for us? When he doesn’t give a damn?’

  It was a well-worn dispute. The two men batted familiar arguments at each other, both only half-convinced by their own assertions. Only this time, Mason came up with something new. He brought it up with a chuckle swelling in his throat.

  ‘Ha! Only he does.’

  ‘Does what? Give a damn?’

  ‘Right. He wants money pretty bad. You want to guess why?’

  ‘His parents have a farm, you said.’

  ‘Yeah, only it ain’t that.’

  ‘There’s something else?’

  ‘What else would get him? What would the guy want more than anything in the world?’

  Willard rubbed his hand across his forehead and was suddenly struck by a quite unexpected picture: a picture from wartime, from the simple French aerodrome where Captain Rockwell had briefed his pilots. There was a sadness in the man’s face which Willard had never noticed at the time, but which he was quite sure he hadn’t invented. What would Captain Rockwell most want? That was easy: he wanted his pilots to come back alive.

  Willard didn’t say so. Instead he answered, ‘I don’t know. What?’

  ‘An airplane, of course. He wants an airplane which can fly to Paris.’

  ‘The Orteig Prize?’ Willard gripped the phone more tightly. He felt a glow of happy relief begin to spread outwards from his chest.

  ‘The Ortik? Yeah, something like that. Jeez, Thornton, maybe you understand that kinda thing. Me, I think the guy’s nuts. He says he doesn’t even like Paris.’

  But it made sense. The thing that had always bothered Willard most was this: what possible motive could drag his old commander into a life of crime? If the answer were in order to win the Orteig Prize, then maybe the whole thing began to make sense. But Willard had become too much the perfect Investment Bureau professional to relax too quickly.

  ‘That accounts for Rockwell, maybe. It doesn’t account for the Hamilton girl.’

  ‘Right. Only like you say, she’s a girl.’

  ‘So? I don’t –’

  ‘She’s got a thing for him. I didn’t know it for sure before, but now I do.’

  ‘They’re together? He and she, they’re –?’

  ‘No. Leastways, I’m pretty sure they’re not. Only she’s hot for him. He came pretty close to telling me as much, but I figured the rest. Why else would a dame do something like this?’

  The happy glow spread further still. Rockwell was nuts about planes, the girl was nuts about Rockwell. It all began to make sense. And if so, then Willard could relax. He needn’t take action. His old commander would be allowed to live, not die.

  ‘So we can lay off?’ said Mason.

  ‘Gosh, well it’s certainly nice to know…’

  ‘I sent some guy
s down to check what this mechanic Hueffer is up to. And everything Rockwell says seems to be true. They’re testing out a whole lot of airplane designs, they’ve already been speaking to a couple of airplane makers… It all checks out, buddy.’

  Willard hardened. It wasn’t Mason’s place to call him ‘buddy’. Willard felt a mean-spirited desire to remind Mason who was boss. He leafed through the most recent batch of documents Mason had sent up and found a list entitled ‘Marion newcomers: last four months’. Mason had compiled the list at Willard’s request. There were fifteen names on the list and Willard began to question Mason on each one, with a needless combination of sharpness and pomposity.

  But Willard’s attention was only half taken up with Mason’s answers. What had Captain Rockwell wanted most? He had wanted his pilots to come back alive. He had wanted Willard to come back alive. The realisation prompted a curious mixture of feelings: happiness, pride, nostalgia, longing, grief. His attention was only half on the conversation as he and Mason worked their way down the list. They reached the last name: ‘(Lundmark, Bradley ??)’

  ‘Why the question marks? Why the brackets?’

  ‘Not sure about his first name. It’s only a kid. A youngster from Brunswick that does jobs for us. He ain’t strictly a resident, only we keep him kinda busy, so he hangs out with us plenty.’

  Willard shifted in his seat, annoyed. ‘Why? Why do that? That’s a security risk. We should only keep people in town who…’

  Willard lectured Mason, until even he grew bored with the sound of his voice.

  ‘Yeah, sure, you’re right. We’ll send him back. He’s only a kid though. I wouldn’t worry.’

  Somewhere a thought jabbed in the back of Willard’s brain.

  ‘A kid? How old?’

  ‘Don’t know. Fifteen, maybe.’

  ‘The surname? It’s not so common. Wasn’t one of your neighbours up the hill called that?’

  ‘What? Lundmark?’ Mason’s voice suddenly tightened. Willard spotted the tightening with glee. He’d caught Mason out and would relish pressing home his advantage.

  ‘That’s the name we’re discussing,’ he said primly.

  ‘Shit, yeah, let me think … it was a while back … only, yeah, we did have to waste a couple of guys. Think one of them could have been a Lundmark, yes.’

  ‘Could have been?’

  ‘Was. Was a Lundmark.’

  ‘And old enough to have a fifteen-year-old boy?’

  ‘I guess so. Yes. Shit.’

  ‘You killed the father and you’ve hired his son to run errands for you?’

  Willard’s voice was icy. Mason’s voice was unnaturally hushed and submissive as he replied. Something on the phone line between them suddenly took on a deathly edge. Not figuratively, literally. Both men knew what had to be done.

  PART FOUR

  Control

  The thing about riding bikes is that it’s fun in the summer, but a pain in winter.

  So, as autumn came around, two Ohio bicycle manufacturers, Wilbur and Orville Wright, found themselves bored. Aviation caught their attention. They got hold of the available literature and read it with care. And the more they read, the more they realised that the whole problem now lay with control: how to manoeuvre an aircraft in flight.

  Most people before them had thought about using a movable tailplane, rather like the rudder of a ship. But the Wright brothers knew about bicycles, and bikes depend on a different action: the action of banking into a turn. Perhaps aircraft would need to do the same? And perhaps that could be achieved the way birds did it: by turning the tips of one wing up and the tips of the opposite wing down…

  It was a good idea. But just having one smart idea didn’t make an airplane. Though the Wright brothers got a start from the literature which George Cayley had first stimulated, they still had to solve every single problem as it came along. How to make the plane light enough? How to make it strong enough? How to design the propeller? How to generate the thrust.

  But they were brilliant mechanics – visionary and practical; creative and persistent. One by one, the problems were solved. On 17 December 1903, the Wright brothers made the world’s first true flight: manned, powered and controlled. Over the next two years, they made a series of improvements, culminating in a non-stop flight of no less than twenty-four miles.

  And how did the world react to this conquest of the skies? The answer is simple: it didn’t. On the day the Wrights invited the press to witness their accomplishment, the engine had a problem and the Flyer No. 2 didn’t fly. The following day, the press witnessed a sputtering twenty-yard glide. And after that, they just plain weren’t interested. Three years after the Wrights had conquered flight, the number of working airplanes in the world numbered just one.

  So, inevitably, the airplane was invented all over again. In France this time, by a dapper little Brazilian, Santos-Dumont. The Brazilian’s plane was less well-designed than the Wrights’, but it conquered the fourth and final challenge of flight: to get into the air in a place where there were pressmen and cameras. In 1906, the age of aviation had truly begun. The world went aviation-crazy, led by the French. Many of the words that describe the airplane come to us from the French, for that reason: fuselage, aileron, aerodrome.

  And the Wright brothers’ most lasting achievement? To realise that a plane needed to bank like a bicycle, not steer like a boat. The Wrights’ wing-warping technology itself didn’t last long. Ailerons did the job better and safer. But there it was. Cayley’s magic trio was complete. Lift, thrust, control.

  Now it only remained to find people willing to risk their necks and fly.

  86

  The hotel was a crummy little dump on the Gulf coast, a few miles up from Naples. Once upon a time, the place had been painted pale green, the colour of seasickness on a girl’s face. But that had been long ago. Since then, sun and rain had amused themselves picking scabs of paint from the flaking wood, splintering and cracking the sagging veranda. A few tough weeds had found footholds in the corners of the red-tiled roof. The sun tried to burn the weeds. The weeds tried to outlast the sun. As a hotel, the place was worse than awful. As a hide-out it was better than excellent.

  Jim Bosse and Haggerty McBride looked like – well, they looked like what they were: Washington bureaucrats. Serious men. Dark suits, white shirts, navy ties. Briefcases. Something weighty in their faces, something unsmiling, businesslike and tough. The farmboy look in Bosse’s face was still there, only further back this time, maybe too far to reach.

  The two men sat in a private room off the hotel lobby. They rose from their seats as Abe, Pen and Hennessey entered. On the table in front of them, a plate of cookies and a jug of tepid water grew bored together. Everyone sat.

  Bosse spoke first. ‘Miss Hamilton, Mr Hennessey, you haven’t met my colleague, Haggerty McBride. He’s been working with me on this case. He’s the only one in the IRS who knows as much as I do about it. ’Most everyone else knows ’most nothing at all.’

  McBride shook hands – strong handshakes, but not warm – then sat back down, flicking a couple of crisp white business cards across the table. Nobody looked at them.

  Meantime, Bosse opened his briefcase. Photos and documents spilled out. It was everything that the team had accumulated over the last three months. Freighters loading and unloading, bringing the booze that flowed out across America, releasing a whole tide of money in its wake, money and violence, money and blood.

  ‘Well boys – ma’am – you fellers have done good. No. It’s beyond good. You got everything we wanted. Everything and more.’

  ‘You got the accounts? The payroll?’

  Abe licked his lips. He’d obtained less than Bosse had asked for, more than he himself had hoped for. They had eight weeks’ continuous payroll data. They had a set of management accounts covering the last six months.

  ‘Yes. Copies. Which I know you’re happy to swear to.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Of course, it’s a q
uestion of whether the courts will acknowledge them. The mob will try to have them struck out as fabrications. But still, Captain, you’re an excellent witness. It ain’t every witness who’s got a drawer full of medals and a citation direct from Congress.’

  ‘Suppose we produce a witness to authenticate them?’ It was Pen who spoke. Bosse and McBride swivelled to look at her.

  ‘A witness? Who? It all depends. A court would need to find the person credible.’

  ‘How about the chief buying agent for the organisation? I’d say he was credible. And a louse, by the way. I hope you stomp on him.’

  She pushed a fat manila envelope over the table. The envelope bulged with paper. Bosse opened it and began to read, handing the papers to his partner as he read. ‘Jesus,’ he said after a moment. ‘Jesus.’ The way he said it, it sounded less like a blasphemy, more like an acknowledgement of prayers answered.

  He put the package down.

  ‘You put a wire tap on his phone?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Hired a bilingual secretary in Havana to transcribe it.’

  ‘And these conversations… Lambaugh’s taking kickbacks direct from his booze suppliers. He must be making six, maybe seven thousand dollars a month.’

  ‘At least. A lot of the time he does business face to face and we didn’t pick up anything from the phone.’

  Bosse’s grin spread slowly, like a sunflower opening. ‘How the heck did you know? What made you think it’d be a good idea to stick a wire tap on his phone?’

  Pen shrugged. ‘Various things. The way he lived… I know it is Havana and all, and his regular salary must be sweet enough. All the same … the cars, the gold watches, the girls. I couldn’t figure it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I found a letter changing the security arrangements on Marion’s purchasing account in Havana. That seemed like Bob Mason had some of the same suspicions I did. It seemed worth a try.’