Bosse put his hand on the documents, proprietorially. ‘Does Lambaugh know about this material yet?’
Pen shook her head. ‘No. We figured you might want to tell him.’
‘Sure… I go along there, offer him a choice. He gets to cooperate with us or we hand all this material over to Uncle Bob Mason and your buddy Lambaugh gets to try and explain this to him… Uh-huh, he’ll cooperate, I figure he’ll cooperate.’
He glanced across at McBride, who nodded too. Now it was Bosse’s turn to produce some documents. He doled them out in three piles and pushed them over the table. Abe looked down at his. The documents were all stamped with the crest of the IRS.
‘What the…?’
Bosse chuckled. ‘Sorry, folks. Only looking over our records, it seems like none of you fellers have filled out a tax declaration. We wouldn’t want to go arrest everyone in Marion and then have some smartass lawyer start pointing out that we hadn’t made all the arrests we should’ve.’
Abe and Pen looked at each others incredulous but smiling. Hennessey said nothing, just put his fingertips to the tax documents and pushed them away. With Mason’s money, Abe and Pen had earned plenty that year, easily enough to make a declaration. But the shine on the storekeeper’s suit told its own story, and Bosse took back the third pile in silence. For the next fifteen minutes, Abe and Pen sat side by side, their pens scratching away over the black and white forms. They completed their forms and passed them back to Jim Bosse, who grinned. ‘Ain’t taxmen awful?’ He began folding away the forms. The room was silent.
Abe felt Pen’s love tugging at him from three feet away. He felt strange. If Bosse concluded – as he should do – that their task was complete, then there was no reason for the team to stay together any longer. Abe had his plane to build and fly. But because his mind was far away, it took him a moment or two to realise that Bosse hadn’t yet said what he needed to say. He hadn’t said: ‘Good job, well done, we’ve got everything we need, now there’s nothing more for you folks to do.’ Abe looked over at the two taxmen with sudden concern.
‘Well?’
‘Well, good,’ said McBride, speaking for almost the first time.
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that if we choose to go ahead at this stage, we’ve got absolutely everything we need. Thank you.’
And there it was. If. A little word with a big voice. An if with no place in that room, not then, not ever.
‘If?’ said Abe a second time, his voice cracking with sudden dryness, ‘What the heck are you talking about If?’
87
Brad Lundmark was eating a sandwich down by the river. The Okefenokee ran dirty green, the colour of pond water mixed with old tea. Brad sat on the dirty concrete quay, leaning up against one of the steel mooring bollards, feeling its warmth against his back. His sandwich was a favourite: smoked ham and dill pickle. That was one of the good things about Marion. Unlike its poor cousin up the hill, Marion had money. Easy money, lots of money. The boarding house where Lundmark stayed had things on its menu which he’d never even heard of in Independence. So he experimented with new things. Smoked ham and dill pickle; new types of soda; candy like he’d never known it.
There was a movement down the quay. Bob Mason was there, hat in his hands, shading his eyes against the sun. He saw Lundmark and approached.
‘Hey there.’
‘Hey.’
‘You’re Lundmark, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Getting on OK?’
‘Yep.’
‘Good. You ain’t had no problems with anyone?’
‘No. Folks have been real nice, sir.’
Brad knew who Mason was – everyone in Marion did – but he didn’t understand why the man had sought him out or what these questions were all about. He shifted position on the quayside, still keeping his back against the bollard, but shifted around so he could see Mason more easily.
‘Good, that’s good.’
Lundmark nodded. He didn’t know what to say, so he said, ‘Thanks.’
There was a pause.
Mason stuck his hands in his pockets and said, ‘Hey, you want gum?’
‘I got some.’
‘You want more? What have I got here? Peppermint. I hate peppermint. You like it?’
‘Sure.’ Lundmark took the gum. He still had half a sandwich to finish, so he laid the gum beside him on the hot concrete. ‘I’ll have it after. Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’ Mason wiped his head and put his hat back on. ‘You take care, right? Any problems, you come tell me.’
‘Sure. Thank you, sir.’
Mason nodded. Lundmark twizzled around again, his back to Mason, staring out over the dirty green water. He was a strange guy Mason, Brad thought. He was a murderer, of course, but a nice guy too. In the world where Brad had grown up, morality had tended to come in simpler colours. He’d never imagined that a hoodlum like Mason could also be a pleasant individual, one to one. He bit into his sandwich, reflectively.
It was at that moment that Mason squeezed the trigger.
The shot cracked out, but the kid never heard it. The bullet, speeding ahead of its own detonation, entered the back of his head dead centre, just above the furthest outward bulge of the skull. The bullet did what it had to do and moved on, exiting Brad’s forehead in a bloody mess. The boy – or rather the corpse which had so recently been a boy, still holding its sandwich – toppled face forwards into the greasy water. The water made a brief glooping sound, then closed over the site.
The only sign that there had ever been anyone sitting on the quayside was the packet of gum lying by the bollard in the sweltering sun. Mason didn’t have the heart to pick it up.
88
It had been Haggerty McBride who had used the word if, but it was still Jim Bosse who answered, albeit indirectly. He tapped the pile of documents.
‘These documents. They detail a business enterprise on a major scale. Revenues are vastly in excess of costs. The payroll alone provides grounds for prosecution. We have no records of anyone in Marion filing a tax return. The documents you have collected are, in our opinion, sufficient evidence of systematic tax evasion – not to mention numerous other counts if we can get them to stick. On the basis of this evidence, I have no doubt we would obtain a large number of convictions.’
‘Good. That’s what we wanted to achieve. That’s all we ever wanted to achieve.’
‘Really, Captain. You’re sure?’
‘Damn right, I’m sure.’
Bosse nodded and sat back as though satisfied by Abe’s answer. Only McBride continued to sit forwards. Abe suddenly realised that he’d been wrong to assume that Bosse was in charge. The power-chemistry suddenly flipped, and Abe realised that all along it hadn’t been Bosse, but the younger-looking McBride who was running this show. If he’d bothered to look at it earlier, McBride’s business card would have told him as much: Haggerty N. McBride, Director, Special Investigations Unit. The sudden shift of authority in the room was unsettling, as was that as-yet-undetonated if.
McBride took a cookie from the plate, crumbled it in his hands, but didn’t put it anywhere near his mouth. Outside, a gull screamed with sudden loudness beyond the window.
‘Captain, let me ask you a question,’ said McBride. ‘In your opinion, is Robert Mason the head of an entire organisation or merely the head of one of its important subsections?’
Abe went still. The room went still. Strange though it seemed to admit, it was a question Abe and the others had never really considered before. Hennessey had asked Abe to destroy Marion. Abe and the others had pretty much fulfilled that brief. What lay on beyond Marion was a question to which Abe didn’t attach a lot of importance. But his answer, when it came, was unhesitating.
‘The volume of alcohol we shift. It’s vast. It’s enough to supply entire cities. Large ones. If Mason acts independently, then he’s got some pretty good buddies in the business … but no, on balance no, I don’t think he
’s independent. I guess he takes his orders from someplace else.’
McBride nodded.
‘We think so too.’
Abe shot a glance sideways at Pen and Hennessey. Their faces were carefully impassive, but he guessed their feelings must be in as much tumult as his.
‘I’m afraid that’s not my business, McBride. Hennessey here asked for help freeing up Independence from an unpleasant neighbour. We set out to do that. And only that.’
McBride made a courteous gesture with his hands that didn’t mean a whole lot. ‘Like I say, that’s fine. If you want us to go ahead with what we’ve got, we’ll get things moving right away.’
That if again. The word didn’t improve with repetition.
‘And why wouldn’t I want you to go ahead?’
McBride sat back, appeared to notice the cookie crumbled half to powder in his hand and dusted it off onto the plate.
‘In our view, you have broken into one of the most important criminal organisations in the country. Perhaps the largest and the most important. You’ve busted one of their major import routes right open. But these documents suggest to us that there’s a whole lot more to do. Suppose we smash Marion? Hit it so hard it never grows back? Mr Hennessey, you’d get your town back. Captain, Miss Hamilton, you’d be able to get on and live your lives knowing you’d done a great and courageous thing. But you’d know, all of you, that someplace else, unknown to you and unknown to us, another Marion was being built. An organisation like this isn’t just gonna throw in its hand. It’ll rebuild. There’ll be more mobsters. More guns. More booze. More violence. In the end, we’ll have shifted the problem, not eliminated it. That’s why I say if. But it’s up to you. Few people could have accomplished as much. Perhaps nobody would choose to do more.’
Outside the room, waves beat up on the white Naples shoreline. Gulls pulled stunts in the air. The old wood of the hotel creaked and settled.
McBride spoke again. ‘I haven’t been specific. I ought to be. What we are asking is for you to deliver the entire organisation to us. Not just the right hand, but the head and the heart as well. We want to smash not a sub-unit of the organisation, but the organisation itself. To do that, we’ll need to connect Marion to the headquarters. We’ll need enough evidence to obtain search and arrest warrants. Those warrants will give us enough further evidence to do the rest.’
‘You say you want to connect Marion to the centre…?’
‘Money. There’s only one way to do that meaningfully and that’s by tracing the flows of money. Bank transfers between business units. And we would need the documents themselves. We can make witnessed copies ourselves and return the originals to you, but no Morse code, no light bulbs, no handwritten copies, no witnesses making a confession under duress.’
Abe thought about his little team. Gibson Hennessey, Pen Hamilton, Arnie Hueffer, Brad Lundmark. Hennessey had only ever asked for help in claiming Independence back from the mob. He wanted peace and quiet to return to town, maybe a little prosperity too. He hadn’t wanted to clean up America. He hadn’t asked for Abe to do that.
And meantime, Abe’s Atlantic dream sprang up at him with renewed force. He could almost feel the shudder of a metal wing ripping through a North Atlantic gale. He could see the dirty weather battering the windscreen, hear the howl of an engine out-screaming the winds. He couldn’t wait any longer to devote himself to that dream. He couldn’t bear any longer to devote himself to an objective which wasn’t really his.
He shook his head, just once but with absolute decision.
‘I’m sorry, McBride. I’ve done what I was asked to do. And that’s it. That’s where I stop. I’ve reached my limit.’
Pen heard those words through a fog.
He was giving up. He was moving on. Having done something brilliantly, he was abandoning it unfinished. With the vital exception of his wartime career, he was doing what he’d always done: running away. And it was in that moment then Pen knew something else as well: that it was useless for her to love him. He’d never give her what she wanted. The greatest man she’d ever met was also, strange to say it, a coward.
Her eyes dazzled with tears. He would never love her, she realised now, not because she wasn’t the right girl for him, but because he was too much of a coward to commit himself. It seemed like the worst reason in the world, but also the most final. Her grief was so strong, she was hardly able to speak.
89
The port decanter shone dully in the candlelight.
It was late in the evening. The women, including Rosalind, had already retired to the drawing room, in the English style. There were a few house guests staying for the weekend, but one or two had gone to bed, another trio had headed off to the billiard room. There were only four men left at table: Willard, his father, and two young men who were here as guests of Willard’s middle two sisters. Junius Thornton didn’t drink much and never got drunk. Willard had drunk plenty but was practised enough to hold it. The other two men had drunk excessively and were slumped staring at the candlesticks on the long mahogany table, trying to keep the two dozen candle flames from blurring into four or even six dozen.
Junius Thornton glanced contemptuously at the two youngsters, then got up heavily to take a couple of cigars from the sideboard. He handed one to Willard, and the two men, father and son, shared the ritual of preparing then lighting the tobacco. They inhaled, let their dinner jackets fall open, sat back, stretched out.
‘The war,’ said Junius.
‘Yes, Father?’
‘That conversation at dinner. I didn’t ask what you thought.’
‘No.’
The conversation had been a rare one. In these days of peace, it had almost become as though the war had happened in a previous century or to a different country. Mentions of it were rare; discussions still rarer.
All the same, it had happened. Abby, a girlfriend of Willard’s youngest sister, had been speaking about the negotiated Armistice of November 1918, which many in the American army had been fiercely opposed to. ‘How could anyone have wanted that terrible war to have lasted a second longer?’ she’d cried. ‘Every day young men were being killed. Think of them! Think of their poor families!’
Her speech had been followed by a half-second of silence. Then Junius had spoken, his tone of voice ended the conversation as firmly as his words.
‘The consequences of aggression must always be brought home to the aggressor. Germany needed to feel the pain of invasion and defeat on her own soil. Though the English and the French lacked the stomach to continue, they may yet regret their timidity.’
Willard nodded to indicate that he remembered the conversation. His father said, ‘Well? What is your opinion of the question?’
‘Well, I mean I can see what Abby meant. After all, it was one thing in the Army Air Corps. It was dangerous enough, but at least it was quite civilised. It was quite different for the poor soldiers on the ground. They lived underground, little better than rats, really, not to speak of the danger and the bloodshed, the endless mud, the guns going off around them all the time… But then again, Papa, I think you’re right. If a person starts a thing, he needs to finish it. Properly finish it. I’m not sure we ever really did,’ he concluded, pleased with himself.
Since joining Powell Lambert – and especially since being elevated to the heights of the Investment Bureau – Willard had become more decisive, more single-minded. Although he could still become tongue-tied or excessively talkative with his father, the problem now was nothing like as bad as it had been. His father seemed to agree with him, nodding his head sharply twice in a gesture of assent.
‘The Firm – Thornton Ordnance, that is; Powell Lambert didn’t exist back then – the Firm spent five and a half million dollars seeking to persuade people that an unconditional surrender by the Germans was the only acceptable outcome. Five and a half million dollars. If we could have spent more to any effect, we would certainly have done so.’
‘Gosh, Father! Fiv
e and a half million dollars!’
Willard spent a moment trying to imagine how that vast sum of money had been spent – who had taken it? And in exchange for what promises? – but he failed entirely.
‘It wasn’t much. At that time, the Firm was earning eighteen million dollars a month in net profit. Each further day of combat was worth approximately half a million dollars. The arithmetic was not difficult to perform.’
Willard tried to get his head around his father’s way of thinking and failed – then tried again, and succeeded; or almost succeeded; or achieved something that felt like succeeding. Willard thought of his father’s utter commitment to success, his blunt attitude to violence. And perhaps he’s right, he thought. Perhaps Europe and America would now be more secure if the victory had been clearer. Perhaps Powell Lambert’s ruthlessness does mean a cleaner, better organised, less anarchic industry.
In any case, something had suddenly become clear. He had been firm in Marion, but not yet firm enough. It was no use waiting to see if Rockwell was a danger or not. The man had to be pushed. He had to be provoked into revealing his intentions. And Willard realised he knew how to do it. He stood up abruptly.
‘I’m sorry, Father. I’ve just realised I’ve got a call to make. Right now. Business.’
The older man nodded. The ghost of a smile hung on his heavy features, looking as permanent and appropriate as a lace handkerchief on a lump of granite. ‘Good boy. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Willard made his call, waking Mason but not caring. Willard said what he had to say. Mason understood the first part of it, not the second, but agreed to get both parts done in any case. Willard hung up and walked slowly back to the drawing room, looking forward to seeing Rosalind’s slim grey-gold beauty again after the black-and-white sombreness of the exclusively male company.
For another two hours that evening, he was dazzling, lively, the centre of an adoring family’s attention. And it was only when he went upstairs to get ready for bed that night, that a thought struck him.
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