Glory Boys

by Harry Bingham

  Roeder leaned forwards. ‘You don’t know? You’re telling me you don’t know?’

  ‘You dumb bastard, Carpenter. How’s it gonna feel being fired and dumb?’

  But Roeder was already heading for the door. If McBride wasn’t here, they’d have to find him.

  127

  A cottonfield in Georgia, ploughed up and red under the aching sun.

  A little way to the south and east, there’s a storm coming in, but ahead of its violent battlements, there’s a small plane, red and white painted, racing clear.

  And it is clear. The storm is moving more slowly now. The plane does a hundred miles every hour, that’s more than fifteen miles in ten minutes. After thirty minutes of excruciating flying, uncertain of her direction, struggling to hold height, and visibility not an inch beyond her propeller, Pen had seen a gap.

  Or not a gap exactly. Not a clearing, not even a whitening in the cloud. But suddenly there had been some lessening in the darkness that surrounded her. Movement outstripping thought, she dived for the hole. The big plane had plunged through the air. For a split second she thought she had failed to escape – but then the gap appeared again: a glimpse of dirty soil far below and only a thin grey film of racing cloud in between. She plunged again for the opening and caught it.

  With the storm massive over her head, she flew in the thin gap between earth and sky. But she had direction now. She could see where the landscape beyond shone gold and clear in the afternoon sun. She raced for the sunlight.

  After putting enough clear distance between herself and the storm, Pen looked for a landing site and found one. She set the plane down, jumped from her cockpit and ran to the forward one.

  ‘Abe?’ she shouted, ‘Abe?’

  The shape in the front of the plane stirred. Abe’s face turned to hers.

  There was blood sheeting the front of his goggles and more blood oozing from the flap of his flying helmet. But he was grinning. In his hand he held a red clay roof tile, broken in two. The tile must have struck him over the ear, concussed him, knocked him out.

  ‘Abe, my love, you’re OK, are you? You’re fine?’

  He nodded muzzily, but didn’t answer her, not properly.

  ‘Neat flying, kid.’

  128

  ‘Haggerty.’

  ‘Ed, hi. This is my colleague, Jim Bosse. I don’t think you’ve met.’

  The three men – the two taxmen and the judge – touched hands briefly. They were in an old three-storey warehouse that fronted the Potomac. The warehouse had been built for the river trade, which had shrivelled away when the railroads arrived. The ground floor was still in use as a tobacco warehouse, and the fumes of the leaves scented the entire building. Upstairs, there was pretty much nothing at all, just bare brick walls, wooden board floors and tall iron-framed windows. It looked like a place where the afternoon sunlight came to die. But the building had power. It had space. And it had privacy.

  A line of wooden tables ran under a row of unscreened bulbs. At the head of the line there was a big stack of cardboard boxes. In the room, mostly seated at the tables, were half a dozen typists, four lawyers, an accountant, and Ed Styles, a judge of the District of Maryland Court.

  Styles looked at the scene. His eyes had an odd way of taking hold of something then hanging on to it, no matter what. Right now, he hooked his gaze onto a secretary who was emptying and sorting one of the boxes. The secretary felt his gaze and her precise, orderly movements became flustered. McBride had known Styles since their college days together and he let the judge take his time. At last, the judge unhooked his gaze and transferred his attention to McBride and Bosse.

  ‘What in Pete’s name are you up to now?’

  McBride didn’t answer directly. He’d already briefed Styles somewhat over the phone.

  ‘It’s been a long haul getting here,’ he said. ‘And not my work mostly.’

  ‘Tax evasion, huh?’

  ‘We gotta stick ’em with something, Ed.’

  Jim Bosse, nodding, muttered in agreement.

  The judge walked over to one of the cardboard cartons and took the lid off. The carton, like all the others, was full of papers. Styles picked the first document from the box. The document was headed ‘Powell Lambert Incorporated, IRS Statement March 6, 1922, Supplementary Material, Appendix IV.’ The judge flipped through the document quickly. He put the document back, carelessly, not getting the edges to line up with the ones beneath. McBride, who couldn’t tolerate disorder, put his hand into the box and straightened it.

  Over to the side of the room, under one of the long windows, stood a little table with a Primus stove and a jug of hot coffee. Bosse poured three cups without milk. McBride meanwhile found some hoop-backed wooden chairs that looked like they belonged in a schoolroom and placed one in front of Styles. The judge took the cup and seat as though being released from a trance.

  ‘Start me from the beginning, guys.’

  ‘OK, it’s like this,’ said McBride. ‘We’ve known for some time that we’ve been missing huge amounts of revenue. Vast amounts. It’s taxation on criminal earnings, but the law doesn’t make a distinction. Income is income. Tax is tax. And we’re missing it. I’m not just talking about one-man bootlegging operations. I’m talking about substantial business organisations, large corporations in effect. We’ve known this for some time. Had hints from all over.’

  Bosse indicated the box of documents that Styles had looked at.

  ‘Want to know what that is? It’s the federal tax returns filed by a Wall Street finance house, Powell Lambert. Now the funny thing is this. The firm seems to do well. Each year its business revenues are up. It owns some pretty nice real estate. Its payroll gets bigger each year. But it makes no profit. Hardly any. No profit it feels like it wants to pay tax on. We’ve audited them in the past. Hit the numbers pretty hard, but it all meshed. I had the feeling at the time we were missing something, and it turns out we were.’

  ‘Booze.’ Styles spoke the word not as a question, but as a statement of fact.

  McBride nodded. ‘Yes. We might never have made the connection, except for this guy, a flier, who crashes his plane in the middle of some hick town in Georgia. The locals there have got bootleggers for neighbours and aren’t enjoying the experience. They ask this flier for help. He agrees. Now, how he gets where he gets is a long story. I don’t think I know the half of it. But the point is, he makes the connection we’ve been looking for. He has a mountain of documents demonstrating that the local operation is making huge money out of bootlegging. Easily enough that they ought to be paying tax on it. Only they aren’t. Of course they aren’t. We asked him to go one step further and help us connect the local operation to the centre. He took a deep breath, but he went right ahead and did it. Him and some others. There was a girl as well. A flier too.’

  ‘A girl? A pilot?’

  ‘Yep.’

  The table they were sitting at had a single drawer on McBride’s side. He slid it open and pulled out four banking ledgers, bound in black cloth.

  ‘I took delivery of these this morning. The girl managed to obtain them from a local bank. The two fliers arrived here this morning, first thing, by airplane naturally enough.’

  ‘Bank records.’

  ‘Right, bank records. These books show huge finance flows from Powell Lambert in New York down to Marion in Georgia. We can trace those cash flows on from there to Havana, Cuba. We have a signed, notarised deposition from the Havana buying agent affirming what those monies were used for. We have a complete picture of the Marion side of things. With these records, I think we can demonstrate that Powell Lambert is involved up to its eyeballs and beyond.’

  Styles had his eyes hooked on the bank ledgers now. When he blinked, his eyelids drooped slowly and heavily like a man about to fall asleep, before rising again the same way.

  ‘And you want what?’

  ‘A search warrant, Ed. A handful of them, in fact. And arrest warrants. The sooner the organisati
on is headless, the better our chance of smashing it completely.’

  ‘You’ve got a list?’

  McBride tossed a couple of typed sheets across the table. The list began with Powell Lambert: its Wall Street office, its Washington office, its handful of regional offices. Every name and address spelled out in full, just the way a lawyer liked it. But then there were other names too. Edward ‘Ted’ Powell. Junius H. Thornton. Their addresses, town and country. And other names too. The names of the bank’s senior officers. The name Willard T. Thornton, the boss’s son. The name Robert Mason, with an address in Marion, Georgia. Fifteen names altogether.

  ‘Each one of these?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘That’s not a handful of warrants, that’s a plateful.’

  ‘A plateful, then. And if we get these, Ed, we’ll locate material which leads us to more people. And those people will lead us to others.’

  ‘Right. Including folk that live right here in Washington.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Including some that work in a big white building on a hill.’

  ‘Right.’

  Styles whistled again. ‘You’ve got all your evidence here?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I’m gonna need help. I’m no accountant, Hag. It’s not that I don’t trust you, but we gotta do this properly. There’s no point in cutting corners, then finding your guys wiggle out of a charge because we didn’t do things right.’

  McBride went silent and Jim Bosse continued instead. He pointed down the tables to the men in suits.

  ‘We’ve laid on four accountants for you, Judge. They’re all well acquainted with court procedure. We’ve got lawyers too, secretarial support. You need help looking things up, getting clear on points of law, we’ve got everything we need right here in this room.’

  ‘It’s gonna take time.’

  ‘It can’t.’

  ‘Two weeks.’

  ‘Two days.’

  Styles shook his head. He addressed McBride directly. ‘You’ve asked for fifteen warrants, Hag. That’s fifteen cases you got to prove.’

  ‘And I need all of them together. If we hit one address early, we’ll never find nothing in the rest.’

  ‘Why two days? What’s the rush?’

  ‘These ledgers. We’d hoped to sneak these out so no one saw. We failed. They saw.’

  ‘Hence this place.’ Styles gestured at the grimy building, the rickety tables, the bare bulbs, the Primus stove.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Two days?’

  ‘Less if we can manage it.’

  Styles shook his head. ‘We’d better get to work, Hag.’

  129

  Pen sat on a train, steaming north.

  Little by little the landscape changed under her gaze. Long gone were the red fields and baked cottonfields of the south. In their place were the smokestacks and dark industrial buildings of the north-east. The deep green of pine trees began to speckle the clearer greens and browns of the deciduous forests. She was heading north, heading for the Canadian border and safety.

  She travelled under her own name, Miss Penelope Hamilton. She had her passport in an inside pocket and two thousand dollars, cash. Although she had friends in Toronto, she wouldn’t stay with them. She’d rent a car, move around, stay in no one place for long.

  And for now, she didn’t need to think about the future. She was happy to let the miles run away under the train and not think too much. Ordinarily, a train stifled her. She hated the stuffy cramp of a train compartment, compared with the speed and openness of the skies. Often enough in the past, she’d let her family or servants travel by rail with her baggage, while she’d flown on ahead by airplane.

  But things were different now.

  Just for a while, she’d had enough of flying. And, what’s more, for the first time in her life, she was in love, and in love with a man who was as perfect for her as she was for him. He’d never stop flying, of course. She wouldn’t ask him to, wouldn’t want him to. But maybe the kind of flying he’d do would change. Arnie Hueffer wanted to design airplanes. Abe wanted to help, wanted to be test pilot to the planes Arnie built. There was a future there, a good one. There was no money in airplane design, of course. Not a dime. But that hardly mattered. Pen had plenty.

  The train slid forwards. The north drew closer. Pen dreamed or dozed. She travelled alone because Abe wasn’t with her yet. He was in Washington, lying low, with one last thing still to do.

  130

  ‘Shawcross?’

  ‘Yeah, got him. Fishing trip. Seems for real.’

  ‘Seems?’

  ‘Left ten days ago. Planned from way back.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘We got to one of the maids. Boss, it ain’t Shawcross.’

  ‘OK.’

  Roeder nodded. His clotted eye with its purple iris was sometimes made painful by excessive light and he had pulled down the blinds in his K Street office window so that the room was heavily shaded. Even so, he sat turned from the window, staring into the deep shadows that edged the room.

  His task in Washington was simple. The two fliers had made their way through to McBride. McBride was presumably holed up somewhere right now with a stack of incriminating documents working to get the warrants that he needed to proceed further. Over in New York, Ted Powell had told his subordinates to inventory their documents, ready to destroy the most dangerous. But nobody wanted to take such a step if it could possibly be avoided. The thing was to stop McBride.

  And clever though McBride might be, he had a chink in his armour. To get the warrants, he needed a judge. If Roeder could find the judge, he’d have found McBride.

  Roeder went back to his list. Thompson, Roeder’s chief lieutenant, stood ankle-deep in the shadows, waiting for his boss.

  ‘How about Styles?’ asked Roeder. ‘We got a fix on him yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘We ain’t got a fix on him, but he ain’t at home and he ain’t at work.’

  ‘Ha! How long?’

  ‘Thirty hours.’

  ‘OK. Keep on looking –’

  ‘And that ain’t all.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘We just found out. They’re friends. Him and McBride. They boxed together at college. They go way back.’

  ‘Hah! It’s him.’

  ‘Yeah, boss, it’s him.’

  Roeder stared down at the dim carpet, red and violet, on the floor. He pushed something that didn’t exist with his toe, out in front of him, as though to see it better.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘we know what we gotta do.’

  Thompson nodded and slid silently from the room. He knew all right, he knew.

  131

  Willard, felt like the ugly sister at the dance.

  Washington was filling with men from Roeder’s private army. If Willard was anywhere there was something going on, he was in the way. If he was any place else, he was ignored completely. In the meantime, the Wall Street office was being turned upside down, crisis meetings were being held every day, every hour. The world, it seemed, was in turmoil and Willard had no part to play.

  Except this.

  He had either saved the Firm or he had ruined it.

  He’d been the first one to warn against Rockwell. He’d disposed of Lundmark, scared off Hennessey, cleaned Marion, hired pilots, taken precautions. He’d brought the whole Rockwell-Hamilton-Marion business right to the forefront of the Firm’s attention. That was the list of his achievements, and it was a good one, one that should earn him plenty of credit.

  But there were also negatives, or one in particular. Roeder had wanted to kill Rockwell right away. Willard had refused.

  Maybe that fact wouldn’t be enough to damn him. Maybe the credit list would blot out that single negative. Only maybe not. Willard couldn’t tell. He couldn’t get his father to speak to him. He’d spoken to Powell on the phone, but only briefly and not in any way that meant anything. Was Willard
still the natural inheritor of Powell Lambert? Or would his father, ruthless as ever, choose to blame his son?

  Willard didn’t know. He had no way of knowing.

  In his pocket, he still carried an envelope containing the liner ticket, passport and money. If Willard could have thought of a way to get them to his old commander, then he would have done. But he couldn’t. He knew the whole dangerous game was in its last explosive stages, but how to get Captain Rockwell to a place of safety, he just couldn’t work out.

  Also one other not-so-little fact. Willard had been dumped by his fiancée. And nobody knew. Nobody was interested enough in Willard to give a damn. There was literally only one person in the world whom Willard had confided in: little Annie Hooper, all the way over in New York.

  And she’d been a sweetheart. She’d cried on his behalf, with immediacy and naturalness. She’d taken his side. She’d comforted him. There was a tone in her voice which expressed astonishment that any woman in the world could be lunatic enough to ditch Willard. It wasn’t a lot to boast about, maybe, but there was at least one person in the world, Annie Hooper, who still thought that Willard was really quite a guy. In time perhaps, he’d get consolations from elsewhere. Other friends. Family. Other girls. But in the meantime, it mattered. He spoke to Annie at least once a day. Usually twice or three times. They told each other things they wouldn’t have said to anyone else. Each time he got off the phone to her, he found himself thinking about her a little more.

  And in the meantime?

  In the meantime, he was forced to hang around Washington like the ugly sister at the dance. He got drunk in his hotel room. He visited the museums. He got Gregory, the chauffeur, to take him on car rides into the country. On one occasion, they’d driven out to nowhere in particular. Willard had produced a bottle of whiskey bought from the hotel bellboy, and the two men had got shit-faced together, Willard and his driver, master and servant. Normally, Willard had contempt for men who let themselves go to that extent.

  But not now, not at the moment. Because things weren’t normal. Things were anything but.