by John Shirley
“I…” Bill swallowed. Whatever Ryan had in mind, he had to be equal to it. “Anything you want to throw at me, sir—I’ll take it on.”
“Bill—” Ryan leaned forward, glancing at the chauffeur to make sure the window to the front seat was closed, and spoke in a low, urgent voice. “Have you heard of something called the North Atlantic project?”
Bill couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “Heard those four words and not a word more. They’re all like monks with a vow of silence when I ask what it is.”
“Yes. Yes, and for several good reasons. Reasons like the United States government—the OSS. British intelligence, Soviet intelligence.”
“OSS—that’s American spies, yeah? When I was with the RAF we’d get a report from those blokes from time to time…”
“Right. Office of Strategic Services.” He snorted. “We run rings around them and the FBI, I can tell you.” The bonhomie faded from his eyes, replaced by a hard glitter as he looked sharply at Bill. “You fought in the war—tell me a little about it.”
It wasn’t something Bill liked to talk about any more than he had to. “Not so much the fighting end. More like support. Onboard radioman for the RAF. Never had to kill a man personally. Eleven bombing missions over Germany—after I was wounded, they found me a place in the Royal Engineers. Liked that better. Got my schooling.”
“Did you feel a great loyalty to the government you fought for?”
Bill sensed this was a key question. “Wouldn’t put it that way, sir. Wasn’t loyal to the government. Never liked ’em. It wasn’t who I was for—it was who I was against. I was against the bloody Nazis—the bastards bunging flyin’ bombs at London.”
Ryan nodded gravely. He made eye contact—and Bill felt the voltage of it.
“My feelings about loyalty,” Ryan said carefully, “are very … particularized. I believe a man must be loyal to himself first. But I also look for men who believe what I believe—men who believe it enough that they know that being loyal to me is being loyal to themselves! Men like you, I hope.”
Bill was moved. This man, one of the world’s most powerful, was opening yet another door to him—and at the same time acknowledging him as an individual. “Yes sir—I believe I understand.”
“Do you? Of course I run a corporation, and I ask for cooperation from people under me. But self-interest is at the root of cooperation, Bill. I intend to prove that self-interest oils the wheels of business—and that freedom from the … the tentacles of government, from the usual social shackles on science and technology and growth, will produce unstinting prosperity. I have envisioned a great social experiment. But Bill, ask yourself, where can a social experiment on a large scale take place? Where in this world is there a place for men like us? My father and I fled the Bolsheviks—and where did we end up? This isn’t the ‘land of the free’ it pretends to be. It’s the land of the taxed. And it was his reluctance to pay taxes that put my father in jail. Every society is the same on the face of the earth these days. But Bill—suppose it were possible…,” his voice pitched low, breathless, “… to leave the face of the earth? Just for a time. Just for a century or two. Until the fools have destroyed themselves with their Hiroshima bombs.”
Bill was flummoxed. “Leave it sir?”
Ryan chuckled. “Don’t look so astonished. I don’t mean we’re going to the moon. We’re not going up. We’re going down! Bill—I have something to show you. Will you take a trip with me … to Iceland?”
“Iceland!”
“Just the first leg. A plane to Iceland—then, immediately, a boat to the North Atlantic. To see the foundation, the beginning, of the North Atlantic project. I’m going to have to trust you—and you’re going to have to trust me…”
“Sir…” Bill swallowed. He was not usually so open with people. But he was moved by Ryan’s passion—and his trust. “You trusted me, guv’nor. Right out of the Christmas cracker. And I’ll trust you.”
“Good—but you’ll be giving me your point of view, Bill. Because I feel you’re trustworthy. Ah—we’ve reached our first stop. We’ll have a few words with one of our resident artists here, and then we’re taking a very late plane to see the North Atlantic project. I’m going to show you a marvel taking shape southwest of Iceland. And I promise that you will be … enraptured.”
* * *
Driving a delivery truck later that night, Gorland spotted the small, discreet sign on the warehouse front: SEAWORTHY CONSTRUCTION. He drove around the corner and pulled up near the loading dock. Even this time of night the place was a hive of activity. One shift clocking out, another one clocking in.
Gorland turned off the engine and adjusted his stomach padding. Hiring a delivery truck was easy. Coming up with a new disguise had used up another hour. He got the delivery service coveralls, stuffed a pillow in them for a big belly, gave himself a scar, and rearranged the toupee. Most of all he rearranged his facial expression—made it the expression of a bored wiseacre.
“Hey how ya doin’,” Gorland said to himself, in the rearview mirror. He made the voice a little higher. He didn’t want anyone recognizing “Frank Gorland.” He was now Bill Foster, delivery driver—because Bill Foster happened to be the name sewn onto the overalls.
He looked over the clipboard that the driver of his borrowed truck had left on the dash. Heinz canned goods, it said. That’d work. The truck was empty—the stuff had already been delivered somewhere—but the warehouse didn’t need to know that.
Gorland climbed down from the truck and stalked over to the loading dock, acting like he was in a hurry to get a delivery over with. He went up the steps like he owned the place. Big steel doors into the warehouse were wide open, and inside a whole separate crew bustled and grunted about crates and palettes supporting intricate steel equipment, the likes of which he’d never seen before.
A sign over the doors, bigger than the business sign out front, read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
A grumpy-looking man in a long coat, horn-rimmed glasses, and a patch of a mustache was supervising a crew of eight men offloading a truck backed to the loading dock—maybe the biggest truck Gorland had ever seen. Gorland watched for a minute as a hefty wooden crate was swung with a block and tackle, several men wrestling it into place on a wheeled pallet. Some of the other crates in the back of the truck looked big enough to hold a small car. Stenciled on one of the crates was DESIGN FACING BLDG FOUR.
“You!” barked the man in the horn-rims. He scowled, not seeming happy to find Gorland staring into the back of the big truck. “What do you want here?”
Gorland meditatively chewed a wooden match and considered the question. Then he hooked a thumb at the truck he’d driven here in. “Got a delivery for a Ryan.” He flashed the clipboard he’d brought along. “Canned goods.”
The man turned to shout, “Careful with that!” at two burly workmen, then turned back to Gorland. “Canned goods? They’ll be glad to hear that out at the site. Second we get this truck unloaded, you back yours up here…”
“Hold on now!” Gorland said, furiously chewing his toothpick. “This here delivery is for a man named Ryan! You him?”
The man snorted in contempt. “Don’t be a fool. Mr. Ryan doesn’t come here in person! I’m Harry Brown; I sign for everything!”
Gorland shrugged and turned away. “Says here Mr. Ryan. I don’t have no other instructions.”
“Now wait a minute, hold on!” Brown stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “They go through food out there like there’s no tomorrow! We got the word from Rizzo yesterday that we had to step up on the canned goods!”
“Fine,” Gorland said, chewing his match. “Then get Mr.…” He paused to squint at his clipboard as if it was written on there. “Mr. Andrew Ryan out here to sign for it.”
“Look—” Brown seemed to be working hard to hold onto his temper. “You know who Andrew Ryan is?”
“I heard of him. Some big muckety-muck. I don’t care if he’s Harry Truman; my instructions say
he’s got to sign or no delivery. Hell, I’ll come back tomorrow, it’s just a truckload of canned food.”
“We’ve got a ship coming in tonight—and they need those goods! They’ve got an army of men out there to feed!”
“So why don’t they buy ’em something to eat local, wherever that is, till we get this straightened out?” Gorland asked, as if innocently amused. “They don’t have a corner grocery there?”
“No, you tubby fool—it’s off the coast of Iceland! And if he buys in Iceland…” He broke off, frowning.
Gorland scratched his head, as if trying to puzzle it out. “Well, maybe I can let you have this one truckload. How many men’s he got out there—one truckload going to be enough? Maybe you want us to send out another?”
“Hell, we could probably use three more!”
“Cost more to get it out here that quick. He give you guys enough budget for that?”
“Enough budget!” Brown snorted and crossed his arms over his chest. “If you only knew what we spent on the air pumps already … Money’s … what they call it … no object. You get it? Now back that truck up here!”
“I dunno. This whole thing—how do I know it’s on the up-and-up if the guy who ordered ain’t here to sign? Who’s in charge at Seaworthy if it isn’t Ryan?”
“Ryan’s the owner, you damned…” He took a deep breath, removed his glasses, polished them with a handkerchief. That seemed to calm him. “Ryan’s the owner. Man named Rizzo, over at the administration office, he’s in charge.”
Brown turned to sign a manifest held up for him by a thickset black man in overalls. Gorland leaned over, trying to make out what was on it. All he could gather was Air purification system bldg 32, 33. And the cost of that system added up to well over a million dollars …
Brown saw Gorland trying to see the manifest and stepped to block his view. “Mister, you sure are a nosy sort…”
Gorland shrugged. “Just as curious as anybody else. Well, I can’t let you sign for this stuff. Where’s this Rizzo’s office at? Maybe I better talk to him…”
Brown hesitated, looking at him suspiciously. Then he shrugged and told him, and Gorland wrote it down on the clipboard. He turned to peer inside the warehouse. “Hey—that one of those bathysphere things?”
Brown stared at him. “What delivery company you say you were with?”
“Me? Acme. Name’s Foster.”
“Yeah? Let me have another look at that clipboard of yours…”
“Now who’s the nosy one? See you when I get the signature, pal.” Gorland turned and hurried down the stairs. He felt the men on the loading dock staring at him. He glanced back and saw one big fist-faced palooka take a sap out of his pocket, and slap it in his palm.
He hurried to the truck, forcing himself not to run, and got out of there as fast as he could. Smiling to himself as he drove away. Maybe this wasn’t going to be a blackmail operation. Maybe it’d be something much bigger …
Yeah. If he figured out where to stand, it’d be raining money—and all he needed was a bucket.
* * *
“It’s not generally known that I sometimes back Broadway musicals,” said Andrew Ryan, as the limousine pulled up in front of the theater. “I prefer to do it quietly. I have a rather old-fashioned taste in music, they tell me—George M. Cohan or Jolson, they’re more my style. Or Rudy Vallee. I don’t care much for this jitterbug business. Don’t understand it.” He waved a hand at the marquee. “You know the work of Sander Cohen? Some say he is getting a bit long in the tooth, but I think he’s every bit the musical genius he ever was … a Renaissance man of the arts, really.”
Bill read the marquee: SANDER COHEN IN “YOUNG DANDIES.”
“Cor!” he burst out. “Me ma took a liking to Sander Cohen, a few years back. Fair wore out his ‘Kissing the Tulip’ on her old Victrola!”
“Ah yes. I was a fan of his ‘No One Understands Me.’ You shall meet him tonight, my boy! We’re just in time to catch his final number—I’ve seen the show many times of course—and we’ll have a word backstage. Karlosky—this is fine here!”
The chauffeur, Ivan Karlosky, was a pale-haired man, scarred and impassive, with a distinctively Russian bone structure. He gave a small salute with his gloved hand and nodded. Bill had heard that Karlosky was not only one of the finest auto mechanics around but also pretty much invincible. No one messed with Karlosky.
Bill got out of the limo, instinctively holding the door for Ryan and closing it behind him. A group of swells spilled out of the theater, laughing—though the music of the show could be heard through the open theater door. The show was still going on. A bored-looking man in spats and tuxedo was escorting a platinum-haired girl in a white mink; two other young men followed with elaborately coifed girls on their arms, all of them tipsy from intermission cocktails.
Bill hesitated as Ryan paused, glowering at the swells, seeming to disapprove of them leaving the theater early.
“Say,” laughed one in a top hat, “that Sander Cohen is a funny old character!”
“I heard some young men go into his dressing room never come out again!” said a sleepy-eyed swell in a bowler hat more seriously, voice low.
“Well, you won’t get me to one of his shows again,” said the top hat, as they strolled wobblingly off. “Mincing about like that! Constantly in the spotlight! All that makeup! Looked like a clown!”
Ryan growled audibly to himself as he glared after them. “Drunks!” He shook his head, stalking toward the alley between the theaters that led to the stage door. Bill followed, feeling a bit squiffy himself though he hadn’t had a drop today. He felt socially out of his depth with Ryan—but the whole experience exhilarated him too.
“This way, Bill,” Ryan muttered. “… Those decadent young poltroons … but it’s ever that way. Inconsequential people know only mockery—only the great understand the great…”
He rapped on the stage door, which was opened by a cigar-chewing bulldog of a man. “Well? Who is it now?”—and then his cigar dropped from his slack mouth. “Oh! Sorry, Mr. Ryan, I didn’t realize it was you, please come in sir, right this way sir, nice night ain’t it?”
What an arse kisser, Bill thought, as the man, practically curtseying, let them in. An echoing passage, and then they were backstage, standing in the wings, watching Sander Cohen. He was just finishing off his climactic number, “Hop Away to Heaven.”
Strange to see a stage show from this angle, everything looking oddly overlit, the clack of heels on the wooden stage audible, the extreme angle not showing the dancers to best effect. They seemed almost to lumber around.
And Sander Cohen was stranger still. The fading Broadway star was wearing a silvery jacket that might have seemed more natural on a Busby Berkeley dancing girl. He had matching silvery trousers with a red stripe down the side; his boots, with heels like a flamenco dancer’s, glittered too. He had a rather bulbous head, with thinning hair emphasized by a great pale swath of forehead not much helped by a spit curl, and a puckish little mustache, upturned at the ends. He did wear a surprising amount of pancake—and what seemed to be eyeliner.
Cohen was sashaying rhythmically about, singing in a jaunty tenor, spinning a silvery walking stick in his fingers. Two rows of very handsome young men and pretty girls danced in chorus patterns behind him. Cohen sang:
“If you want to hop hop hop with me
We’ll multiply like crazy
Like a couple of bunnies
Oh hop to Heaven, just hop to Heaven—with meeeeeeee!”
“Admittedly, a trivial number,” said Ryan, leaning over to whisper behind his hand to Bill, “but the public needs that sort of thing, you know, something light from time to time. Sander would like to be more serious. Artists should have their chance to work without interference. So long as it’s profitable, of course…”
Bill nodded, hoping that this blighter did have some better numbers than this rubbish. He wouldn’t have pictured Ryan listening to this prancing chap
—would have thought him more the Wagner type, or maybe Tchaikovsky. But then, you never knew what kind of music a man might relax with. He’d once known a bare-fisted bruiser of a longshoreman who thought nothing of taking on three men in a bar fight—but burst into sentimental tears when he saw Shirley Temple singing “The Good Ship Lollipop.” Wiping his eyes, sniffing, “Ain’t she a pip?”
The curtain rang down to a rather puny spatter of applause and went back up almost immediately so that Cohen could take several bows that no one was asking for. The dancers hurried offstage.
A gesture from Ryan, and one of the dancers lingered: a corn-fed chorus girl in a bathing suit trimmed in white fur; a great flowing spill of blond hair fell over her pink shoulders; golden bangs stuck to her forehead in a light sheen of perspiration. She was a big girl, in an Amazonian, voluptuous way, and seemed several inches taller than Ryan—but almost shrank in his presence, while her china-blue eyes grew large.
“Mr. Ryan!” Her voice was not melodious. It was rather squeakily grating, to Bill—he hoped she was a good dancer.
Ryan gazed at her benevolently—but with a hungry light in his hard eyes. Then the hunger was somehow folded away, and he seemed almost paternal—carefully reserved. “You positively glowed with talent tonight, Jasmine,” Ryan said. “Ah—allow me to present my business associate, Mr. Bill McDonagh.”
She barely glanced at Bill. “Did you really think I was good, Mr. Ryan? You could see me out there?”
“Of course, my dear. I’ve watched you dance many times. You’re always stimulating.”
“Enough for a lead? I can’t seem to get anywhere in this business, Mr. Ryan. I mean—I got here, but I can’t get any farther than the chorus. I’ve tried to talk to Sander, but he doesn’t seem interested in me. He’s so involved with his, what does he call them, his protégés…”
“A big talent like yours will pop out in good time, Jasmine, don’t you worry,” Ryan said as the curtain closed on another uncalled-for bow by Sander Cohen.