The Forgotten Holocaust (Ben Hope, Book 10)

by Scott Mariani

  Finn darted a nervous glance at his father. He hated the old man being here and speaking to him that way in front of the staff. But you didn’t talk back to Big Joe. That lesson had been learned the hard way, a long time ago. The old bastard could still break a man’s jaw with a single punch.

  ‘I’m ready,’ Finn said to Janet. ‘Let’s do it.’

  Today, the mayor was addressing over twelve hundred workers at Larson Engineering, one of Tulsa’s largest aerospace plants, situated within the Cox Business Center, and producing wings and fuselages for Gulfstream G650 jets. The stage had been set up at one end of a factory floor. Partially assembled fuselages on gantries towered overhead.

  It was stiflingly hot inside the building, but Mayor McCrory maintained perfect composure as he stepped up to the podium amid noisy applause. He was popular here, which was why he’d chosen this venue for today’s speech. The blue-collar crowd were entirely male, virtually all white, and exclusively Republican. Just the kind of audience he liked. He’d slackened off the emerald green tie, and was jacketless, with his shirtsleeves rolled up in order to appeal to the working men.

  Finn beamed and waved until the applause died down. ‘How y’all doing?’ he began, adding a few brief lines about what a valued mainstay of the local economy the plant was and how delighted he was to be back here. He sensed right away that the crowd were with him.

  ‘You know, back during my courtroom days I was always known to be a man of few words. Juries loved me. Everybody got to go home early. So what I have to say to you today won’t take long. I mean, hell, I could stand here all day and go on about all that’s been achieved during my two terms as mayor of this great city of ours. I could talk about how we’ve reduced crime, cleaned up our town and boosted our economy. How we’ve reinforced Tulsa’s already rich history with the energy and aerospace sectors while at the same time instituting new environmental programmes to protect our valuable natural heritage. I could talk about how fast we responded when ninety thousand Tulsans were left without power after last year’s tornadoes, and about the huge success of the rebuilding programmes we put into place after that disaster.’

  He paused, scanning the crowd and seeing nothing but attentive faces.

  ‘But I didn’t come here to yak and throw a bunch of facts and numbers in your face,’ he continued emphatically. ‘We all know that the last eight years have made Tulsa a better place to live, for you, for me, for the next generation. You only have to look around you to see that it’s so. And I’m prouder than I can say to have been a part of it, thanks to the trust and support of the people of Tulsa who elected me for two terms running. Thanks to you.’

  The crowd loved this, and the roar of cheers took a while to die down.

  ‘In fact I’m so darn proud of this city and its citizens,’ Finn went on, ‘that after two terms as mayor, my service to you is far from done. I care deeply about Oklahoma. I know you do, too. That’s why I’m here today, and that’s why I’m taking this opportunity to announce my candidacy for the governorship of this great state. I know I can count on your vote come November.’

  There it was. The big one. More roaring applause.

  The announcement hadn’t been totally unexpected. Rumours had been flying for weeks, but this was the first official confirmation that Mayor McCrory was in the race.

  He waited, smiling, for the din to subside. ‘Now, I’m not one of your fancy-pants preppie types born with a big ol’ silver spoon in his mouth,’ he said, causing a round of laughter. This was an obvious dig at his chief rival in the coming November gubernatorial election, Maynard Leighton Jnr, who had been to Princeton. Liberal, pro-gay, anti-gun, Leighton was a sitting-duck target with this audience. ‘I’m a straight-talking guy from good old Irish stock, just like a lot of you,’ Finn went on, jutting out his chin. ‘I understand what it’s like for the working man. Those strong values have been in my family for generations, ever since my granddaddy, Paddy McCrory, arrived in this great country over a hundred and sixty years ago from a little village on the west coast of Ireland called Glenfell. He came here as a refugee without a cent in his pocket and nothing but the strength in his two hands and the fire in his belly to sustain him.’

  It was the same old account that Finn had enthusiastically repeated in speeches and interviews a hundred times over. The voters loved it and it worked every time.

  ‘He knew what poverty was, and hunger,’ Finn went on in a dramatic tone that had the audience hooked. ‘You bet he did. He threw off the shackles of oppression to come to the land of the free. There was no Oklahoma when he got here. People like my granddaddy, and my daddy after him, built this whole country from the ground up and made our state the best place to live in America. And I mean to see it stays that way.’

  Over the applause, Finn turned from the mike and said, ‘Daddy, why don’t you come over here and say a few words.’

  To universal cheering and clapping, Big Joe McCrory stepped up to the podium. There was not a trace of stiffness in the old man’s stride, and he didn’t need to suck in his belly the way his son did. He bent down close to the mike, glowered severely at the crowd from under bristling white brows and said in a throaty bass rumble that filled the hall, ‘Y’all vote for my boy. Hear me now.’

  With that, amid whoops from the audience, Big Joe turned and calmly walked away.

  Finn was beaming with filial pride. ‘That’s my old daddy, folks,’ he said, returning to the mike. ‘Ninety-eight years of age, and look at him. We McCrorys are famous for our longevity. That means I gotta lot of years left in me, and I intend to use every one of them for the benefit of my fellow Okies. That’s all I have to say.’

  Cue even louder and wilder applause.

  The announcement speech had been a tremendous success. Finn was still wearing a mile-wide grin as he swept out of the building with his entourage trotting behind him to keep up. Big Joe had gone off on his own.

  ‘Call Theo,’ Finn instructed Janet as they strode out into the hot sun. Theodore F. Walsh was the campaign manager he’d hired three weeks earlier in anticipation of today’s announcement, who had in turn hired a small army of strategists and media experts, all waiting in the wings for McCrory’s candidacy to come out into the open.

  ‘Now we can get this show rolling. We’re gonna get our message out there, let rip and win this thing. Leighton hasn’t a chance in hell. Come November, we’re gonna roll right over him like a goddamn juggernaut.’ Finn was on a high, walking fast and talking faster, already visualising himself moving into the governor’s mansion at 820 NE 23rd Street, Oklahoma City.

  ‘No going back now,’ Janet sighed. ‘I just hope we can afford these kinds of campaign expenses.’

  ‘Money?’ Finn scoffed. They were walking past the stationary Gulfstream jet that took pride of place in front of the main Larson Engineering building. Finn knew the type of aircraft very well, as it was the same full-spec model he owned himself. ‘Don’t you worry about money. That’s the easy part. We got ten times more cash than Leighton can even dream of. That little faggot won’t know what hit him.’

  ‘Oh, that’s great,’ Janet said, rolling her eyes. ‘You be sure to say that on NBC, now.’

  Out in the sun-baked parking lot, their three vehicles were clustered side by side: the black mayoral Cadillac SUV, Finn’s own Mercedes SL-class convertible – emerald green, naturally – and the massive red Dodge Ram crew-cab truck that Big Joe insisted on driving himself around in. With jacked-up suspension and massive chromed bull bars, the 4.7-litre monster reflected a lot about the old man’s personality.

  Big Joe was leaning against the door with his arms folded and his thick mane of snowy hair ruffling in the hot breeze. Finn caught the menacing look his father was shooting his way, and felt his euphoric confidence waver a tad. That was when his phone buzzed in his pocket, and he took it out to see he had a new text message. He read it, frowning, then slipped the phone back into his pocket and turned to Janet. ‘See you back at the offi
ce later, okay?’

  ‘Later?’ she queried.

  ‘Something I need to take care of first,’ he replied non-committally, and Janet shrugged and headed off to climb into the SUV with the rest of the staff.

  ‘Don’t you ever call me your “old daddy” again, boy,’ Big Joe growled at Finn. ‘I’ll beat the living crap outta you.’

  Finn knew his father meant it. ‘I’m sorry. It just slipped out.’

  Big Joe snorted in disgust. ‘Governor. Governor my ass. Can’t even drive American.’ He pointed at the Mercedes.

  ‘Two hundred thousand bucks,’ Finn said defensively.

  The old man was not impressed. ‘Two hundred thousand bucks’ worth’a imported tin-can trash,’ he spat, then reached for the door of his Dodge. ‘I’m going home to the ranch. Be heading up to Topeka tomorrow for a couple days, week mebbe. Horse business.’

  ‘Oh. Nice,’ Finn said weakly.

  With a parting hostile glare, his father clambered into his truck and fired it up.

  Finn watched as the Dodge roared away in a cloud of dust. Very softly, as if the old man might be endowed with preternatural hearing, which he very possibly was, Finn muttered under his breath, ‘When are you going to die?’

  The answer was probably never. Finn sighed and walked with slumped shoulders to the two-hundred-thousand-dollar imported piece of tin-can trash.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  As Mayor Finn McCrory knew very well, not all of his granddaddy’s story could be divulged to the public.

  On his arrival in New York City on a cold and windy October’s day in 1851 after a long, harsh sea voyage, the immigrant Padraig McCrory, or Paddy as he’d later become known, stepped off the ship to discover a New World where a strong and growing core of Irish patriots were fiercely supportive of their own. Thanks to that support and the connections that it fostered, he’d quickly found his feet. He was a determined and single-minded man, not afraid to work. He knew horses, and America was the land of horses. By 1858, still playing heavily on his trademark Irish identity, Paddy McCrory had risen up to become a successful dealer in equine flesh, with livery yards all across New York State. When the Civil War broke out three years later, he secured supply contracts with the huge mobilising Union army that multiplied his wealth twenty-fold. By the end of that war, at the age of forty-three, he’d married Mary O’Kelly, an immigrant beauty from Mitchelstown twenty-five years his junior. Nothing would have pleased him more than to have a son and heir, but to Mary’s heartbreak and Paddy’s infinite disappointment, the couple found themselves unable to have children.

  After fifteen years of building his business in the east, Paddy McCrory set his sights on new pastures, and in 1868 took Mary west to Kansas to realise a new dream out there in the Promised Land. It was a place of limitless opportunities for a man of wealth and ambition. From horses, Paddy diversified to that other staple of life on the frontier – guns. Percussion muskets to scatterguns to Colt’s patent revolvers to the new Henry repeating rifles that had been the scourge of the Confederate army in the closing stages of the war; he couldn’t sell enough of them and quickly developed a complete lack of scruple about who his customers were. He sold to lawmen and bandits alike. He sold to the European settlers who sought to protect themselves against Indian raids, then sold to the Indians so that they could better attack the settlers. Within a couple of years, Paddy McCrory had become richer than ever as one of the biggest traders of arms in the emergent Midwest.

  Two decades later, Paddy ‘Boss’ McCrory was still strong and healthy and more ambitious than ever when the Oklahoma land rush of 1889 began. After that year’s Indian Appropriations Bill essentially had opened up two million acres of Indian Territory to anyone with the means and manpower to grab it on a first-come, first-served basis, he jumped at the chance to join in the frenzy. He became one of what were known as the ‘Sooners’, the name given to those opportunists who moved to the new territory ahead of the legal date of 22 April 1889 so that they could pounce on the choicest bits of land before anyone else got a look in. ‘Boss’ laid claim to a vast acreage of prime ranch and pasture land that straddled miles of the Arkansas River, and in the inevitable land wars that followed he defended it with a small army of hired guns, professional killers who plied their trade with ruthless efficiency.

  The area was booming. The newly founded Oklahoma City was established in half a day, bursting from a population of near zero to ten thousand within literally hours. Paddy McCrory was already the wealthiest man in the new state, and set to become even more so.

  Soon after his seventieth birthday, Mary took ill with fever and died. Paddy mourned her, but more than anything he mourned the fact that he would never have an heir to inherit his fortune. He found solace in seeking out new territories to buy and sell, and in conducting campaigns against the scattered groups of Indians who were still bold enough to contest the white man’s supremacy. How many Cherokee and others were slaughtered at the hands of his riders, nobody ever knew.

  Old Paddy McCrory himself just kept on going and going. Portraits showed a large, tough and grizzled man of formidable bearing and stern manner, with piercing wild eyes and thick white hair, which he wore long. Time had seemed barely to touch him – he believed that old age was a state of mind, nothing more. When at the age of eighty-four he fell into a dispute with a cattle baron who tried to swindle him over a land deal, Paddy McCrory had ridden alone to the man’s ranch and beaten him almost to death with his bare fists.

  Finally, at the age of ninety, love re-entered his life in the comely form of Charlotte Polk, the daughter of a Tennessee planter. Truthfully, it had been something of a marriage of convenience: he was rich, she was young, he wanted a son, she was willing to provide in return for the lifestyle he could offer his new bride. It took some doing due to Paddy’s advancing years, but finally by the age of ninety-four, he’d been given the heir he’d always wanted. The proud parents named the baby boy Joseph. It was 1916.

  Paddy McCrory died shortly before the boy’s fifth birthday, after a brief and painful illness. In his final years he was tormented by guilt over the wicked things he’d done during the course of his long and eventful life; on his deathbed he confessed to terrible sins and wept as he begged the Lord’s forgiveness.

  After his death, his widow Charlotte raised their son by herself and was a proud and loving mother. The family business took a bad hit in the Crash of ’29, and for some years the spectre of poverty loomed over them. Then, in 1935, when Joe was nineteen, the McCrorys’ ailing fortunes were spectacularly rescued: the chance discovery of black gold on their land turned out to portend the biggest oil strike the state would see for another decade.

  With the boom of the burgeoning new auto industry, Big Joe McCrory was soon to ascend to the throne of an empire and become the youngest millionaire in Oklahoma.

  The rest, as they say, was history.

  From the Cox Business Center, Finn drove east on Route 66 with the top down and Foster and Allen’s Fields of Athenry blasting on the car stereo. He then cut southwards, passing East Tulsa Bible Chapel and the Church of God of the Apostolic before arriving at Harvey Young Airport on 135th East Avenue. This was the smallest of the city’s three airports and the base for some sixty aircraft, one of which was Finn’s personal Gulfstream. Lately, he’d been making a lot of trips in it down south over Texas to Nuevo Laredo just south of the Mexican border. Nobody in Tulsa asked questions. He could fly in and out whenever he wanted, skirting the city’s air traffic control area, and had his own private hangar.

  The place was convenient in other ways, too. It was one of the only secret rendezvous points that were safe, from Finn’s point of view. His recognisability as mayor made it tricky to conduct illicit meetings with the employees of his real and main business, the covert and rapidly growing enterprise that the likes of Janet Reiss and the rest of his City Hall staff knew nothing about, and which – out of necessity – he’d become highly skilled at keeping total
ly separate from his political life.

  People just assumed that his wealth came from his father. A lot of it did. But Finn’s own money was pouring in faster and faster these days. And if he succeeded in becoming governor, the power he’d have would allow him to open the floodgates and shoot up the Oklahoma rich list.

  Maybe he’d get even richer than Big Joe. Finn secretly dreamed of being able to tell the old bastard that on his deathbed, just to spoil it for him at the very end.

  The dusty white GMC van was parked beside Finn’s hangar with its windows down. As the Mercedes rolled to a halt, the van’s doors opened and Ritter and Moon emerged. Ritter wore military-issue sunglasses and was all in black. Moon was in a blood-spatter T-shirt that said ‘ZOMBIE HUNTER – KILL OR BE EATEN’. Classy, that Moon.

  Finn got out of the car, glancing furtively about to ensure nobody was spying on them.

  ‘Hey, nice boots, boss,’ Moon said. Moon resented his employer’s fancy clothes, just like he resented the two-hundred-thousand-dollar Merc. The McCrorys ate out at the upscale Palace Café two or three nights a week. Moon was more of a Dirty’s Tavern kind of guy.

  ‘What you been doing, chasing parked cars?’ Finn asked, pointing at Moon’s split lip and the purple bruising on his face.

  ‘Ain’t nuthin’,’ Moon replied sullenly, and popped another stick of nicotine gum.

  ‘You boys sure took your time getting back here. Let’s step inside the office.’ Finn motioned towards the hangar’s entrance. He led them into the shade of the building, where the Gulfstream sat cooling after its return flight from Madeira. The two men followed him up the gangway into the plush privacy of the aircraft, which Finn had had specially upholstered in emerald green with little golden shamrock motifs. He threw himself into his favourite seat and looked expectantly at them. ‘Well? You got something for me?’