The Sons of Adam

by Harry Bingham

  His dream had come true.

  More than true. Better than true. Truer than true.

  But Tom was older than he had been on Signal Hill. Older and smarter. He remembered Mitch Norgaard in prison telling him, ‘It ain’t enough to find oil, Tom, it’s turning it into dollars that counts.’

  Tom had been dealt a hand full of aces. But he still had to play them and a dumb move could cost him the game.

  First things first. He’d hired a bunch of lawyers to settle the multitude of claims against Harrelson. He’d settled them as fast as he could, fast and generously. When the dust had cleared, he had undisputed title to all fifteen thousand acres of oil-producing territory, with debts (including the million he owed to Harrelson) amounting to around three million.

  Three million in debt and not a penny in his pocket.

  Tom didn’t care.

  He raised money, somehow, anyhow. It was simple enough. He had fifteen thousand acres of the richest land in the world and banks were dying to lend. With Rebecca handling the finance, Tom stood at the centre of the whirlwind. He planted rigs on his land like he was sowing corn. Within a matter of months his daily production was better than fifty thousand barrels a day. Fifty thousand barrels and income to match.

  Meantime, all around, the world was going crazy. What had been tiny little farming villages turned into honky-tonk boom towns on a scale that made even Signal Hill look provincial. Farmers turned into hustlers, cowpokes into wildcatters. Fields of corn were left to rot, as no one could spare the time to harvest them.

  But Norgaard’s warning rang in Tom’s ears – Norgaard’s warning and Tom’s own experience.

  One day, with the oil price still strong and the oil rage still rising, Tom called a halt.

  ‘A halt?’ asked Rebecca, surprised. ‘We have money for another nine rigs. More, as soon as I can get our next loan organised.’

  Tom bent and kissed her on the top of her beautiful head. ‘A halt. No more rigs. We ought to start selling.’

  ‘Selling?’ Rebecca furrowed her eyebrows. ‘You are joking, I suppose?’

  He smiled down at her. She had an odd way occasionally of sounding like an immigrant newly arrived from the boat. Partly it was her accent, which hadn’t changed through all the time Tom had known her. Partly it was her English, which had remained oddly formal, even old-fashioned at times.

  He bent his knees and whispered, ‘Remember Wyoming.’

  ‘Wyoming? … Ah!’ A look of understanding grew in her eyes. ‘So when do you want to sell?’ she murmured.

  ‘Tomorrow. We’ll start tomorrow.’

  And he did.

  He sold quietly, but fast. He sold land. He sold leases. He sold rigs. He sold out.

  He sold out when the market was still strong, when men were concerned about getting oil from the ground as quickly as possible. He got good prices. In fact, because the oil madness ran so strong, he got crazy prices.

  But the flood of oil was constantly growing. As the flood grew higher, the market began to buckle. Back in 1926, Tom could remember the price of a barrel of West Texas crude rise as high as one dollar eighty-five. Four years later, when he’d struck the Black Giant, prices were round about a dollar a barrel. By the middle of the following year, the glut was so extreme that prices had collapsed down to fifteen cents, six cents, even occasionally two cents a barrel. In Wyoming, the price collapse had happened because there was no way of taking oil from the wellhead to the market. In Texas, the collapse had happened because there was so much oil that the entire world wasn’t capable of soaking it up.

  ‘And what next?’

  Rebecca’s question was simple. Tom’s response was equally blunt.

  ‘We buy, of course.’

  Tom hadn’t spent his entire life trying to get into the oil business just to sell out of it when prices dropped. So having sold, he promptly bought. He bought refineries. He bought pipelines. He bought makers of drilling equipment. He bought gas stations.

  In fact, by now, the middle of 1932, Norgaard Petroleum was heavily invested in every part of the oil business except oil production itself. And, as the oil producers were losing their shirts, taking oil out of the ground at an average cost of eighty cents a barrel and selling it on at an average of just fifteen, Tom, superbly supported by Rebecca, was making money hand over fist.

  Tom brushed pine needles from his pants. It was a relief, frankly, to be without a coat in this weather. He walked deeper into the shade to read the message. It was the same telegram as Alan had seen, in the same tangled English. ‘Having regard to the inadequacies and defecations of the previous contractor (SHELL), the Secretariat of Fuel coming under the authorisation of the Ministry of Industry and Foreign Trade is inviting tenders for a new contractor …’

  Lyman Bard watched in silence till Tom had finished, before spitting tobacco juice on the ground and saying, ‘You think all ginzos are like this?’

  Tom shrugged. ‘Do we care?’

  The telegram might have been sent from heaven. It was an answer to an oilman’s prayer – especially one with a flood of East Texan oil on his doorstep. Tom was so excited his hands had actually been shaking with eagerness.

  ‘Hell, they can’t be. The Mob wouldn’t’ve been nothing but a bunch of pussies if they’d’ve gone about their business like that. “Flight of aircraft not of passenger denomination” – Jesus!’

  Just about the time that Tom had started selling his oil rigs, he’d run into Lyman Bard who’d been hanging round Houston as a drill-for-hire. After an evening spent drinking together, they were solid enough friends again for Tom to offer and Bard to accept the position of Chief Operating Officer in Norgaard Petroleum.

  Tom sat on the ground and gestured back at the tea-kettle refinery, which he’d recently bought for two hundred dollars from its bankrupted owner.

  ‘You reckon we can fix her up?’ he asked.

  ‘We can fix anything,’ said Bard, ‘but I can’t see us wanting to.’

  Tom nodded. ‘OK. Scrap it or torch it. Whichever’s cheaper.’

  Bard assented with a grunt. There was so much over-capacity in the refining industry locally – and so much of it poor quality, like the junk-heap in front of them – that it had become profitable to buy capacity simply in order to close it down.

  ‘The ginzos,’ said Bard, ‘what do we do about them?’

  Tom read and reread the telegram with mounting excitement, then looked up. Fire glinted in his dark blue eyes. Quite unconsciously, his hand had formed itself into a fist, crumpling the telegram into a ball. He beat his right hand softly against the left.

  ‘We have to win this deal, Lyman,’ he said.

  124

  Alan hadn’t given up. He hadn’t forgotten.

  He had hired a big American detective agency, Pinkerton’s, to comb the continent for his lost twin. So far, they’d drawn a blank, but there wasn’t a day that went by when Alan didn’t think about it, when he didn’t half expect to be reunited after so many years.

  And one day, there was news.

  It came over breakfast in the form of a cable from New York. ‘ADVISE SUBJECT LOCATED MORE DETAILS FOLLOW STOP PINKERTONS’. The colour rushed from Alan’s face.

  ‘Tom!’ he cried. ‘At last!’ He pushed the cable across the table to Lottie. ‘I’ve found him!’

  Lottie took in the message and looked up. ‘Darling, congratulations! What wonderful news!’

  Alan was already standing. He rang the bell. ‘Yes, absolutely. Isn’t it? I’ll go straight out.’

  ‘Go straight out? Where out?’

  ‘Hmm? To New York, of course. I’ll leave on the next ship sailing.’

  A servant entered and Alan gave him instructions to pack a bag and book tickets on the next liner bound for New York. Lottie waited in silence as Alan spoke. The servant left.

  ‘Darling?’

  If Alan had been smart he’d have heard the warning note. But he wasn’t and didn’t.

  ‘Yes?’r />
  ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’

  ‘Oh Lord, yes! I’d better tell Reynolds where I’m off to. He’s up to his neck in this Italian oil contract.’

  Lottie’s voice tautened further. ‘There’s a fund-raising do at the hospital tomorrow night. And Tommy’s birthday party two days later. Our Tommy’s.’

  The warning was clear enough, but Alan continued to ignore it. Ever since Lottie had got her hospital fully established, his worst fears had come true. She was spending less and less time with the family; more and more at the hospital. And Alan wasn’t comfortable with the change. It was one thing for the young unmarried Lottie to have nursed the seriously wounded during a time of national crisis; it was quite another for a wife and mother to be doing the same in peacetime London. He didn’t like the smell of war and suffering. He didn’t like the thought of Lottie on the wards. He attempted to be polite, but ended up deceiving no one.

  ‘Oh …’ Alan’s tone was dismissive. ‘More fund-raising? Really? I’m sure you can handle it. I’ll bring Tommy something back from America.’

  ‘Or you could wait a few days. You haven’t even spoken to Pinkerton’s. Wouldn’t it make sense to –’

  The dining-room door opened again. It was Alan’s valet with times of ships sailing from Southampton. Alan examined the list quickly.

  ‘If I leave now, I should be in time for the Caroline. I’ll be in New York before you know it.’

  ‘Darling, you have a life here too. I jolly well do need you at my fund-raising do, as you perfectly well know. And little Tommy –’

  Alan wasn’t listening. ‘Sorry, my love. I need to leave now. I’ll telephone from the dock if I have time.’

  ‘Alan!’

  But it was too late.

  Alan was gone, leaving Lottie white with anger at the table. He felt bad about it afterwards. Bad enough to scribble a note to her from Southampton and post it before the ship left. Bad enough to buy a silly little gift for Tommy and send it with the letter.

  But not bad enough to delay his departure. Not bad enough to overwhelm his excitement at the prospect of finally locating Tom …

  It was seven days later.

  Alan was in New York, so newly arrived that there was still a glimmer of salt sea spray on his coat. Peter Oswald, the senior Pinkerton’s investigator, grinned at his visitor. ‘I can see you didn’t waste any time,’ he said.

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Alan. ‘Not given the news.’

  Oswald plucked at the trace of an old scar over the bridge of his nose. ‘You mean that cable we sent you, I guess.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Uh, well, strictly speaking that cable oughtn’t to have been sent.’

  ‘You haven’t found him?’ Alan felt the shock of disappointment slap into him, grey and chilling, like an Atlantic breaker.

  ‘No, it ain’t that. We got Tom Creeley for you, all right, only the thing is …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, we done good. Too good. We haven’t just found one Tom Creeley. We got ourselves six.’

  ‘Six?!’

  It turned out that Pinkerton’s had indeed done much too well. They’d found a Tom Creeley unemployed and poverty-stricken in a shack near Albuquerque. They’d found a prosperous apple-farming Tom Creeley in Washington State. They’d found a father and son Tom Creeley running a two-bit shrimp-fishing business in North Carolina. And just in the last couple of days they’d found two more Tom Creeleys, a Chicago one and a Canadian one working with illegal papers down in Portland, Oregon.

  ‘Are any of them … ? Could any of them be my Tom Creeley?’

  Oswald plucked at his scar again.

  ‘Yeah, well, the thing is, that’s why they didn’t really ought to’ve sent that cable out. The only Creeley we got who fits your guy’s birth-and-build details would be the North Carolina shrimp-fishing Creeley. The younger guy. The son.’

  Alan nodded. He could already hear the punchline. It was with a hollow voice, he said. ‘I see. But that can’t be my man, because …’

  The detective nodded. ‘Right. We sent an operative down there. The father’s clean. A bona fide father-son relationship we got there.’

  ‘There’s no chance your man might be wrong? It wouldn’t be worth sending someone else? To double check?’

  ‘Not worth a plugged nickel. We sent one of our best guys. This is a pretty regular type of search for us. I’m sorry.’

  Alan nodded. He’d spent more than fifty thousand dollars with Pinkerton’s so far. They’d placed ads. They’d checked phone books. They’d checked voting registers and police records. They’d combed the oil industry from Canada down to Mexico. It sometimes felt as though they’d poured all of America through a fine-meshed sieve – and after all that, they’d come up with nothing.

  Alan was devastated. He thought of home and Lottie. He’d hurt her and hurt their son for what? For nothing. Once again, he saw Tom’s shadow racing ahead of him, into the shadows. He wondered if he’d ever see Tom in his life again.

  Hollow-voiced, he said, ‘There’s nothing more to be done, then? Nothing at all?’

  Oswald shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, I’d say there was nothing. At least, nothing except …’

  Alan jerked his head up sharply.

  ‘Yes? Except?’

  125

  ‘It’s gotta be along this way someplace,’ said Bard, as the right front wheel of his De Soto plunged savagely into a pothole and seemed to think a long time before making up its mind to come out again.

  ‘Boy, am I pleased we took your car!’ said Tom.

  ‘Yeah, but the company pays – hell! – expenses, including – Jesus, would you look at that rock? – new goddamn suspension.’

  ‘Need a coupla new axles, I’d say, only I don’t remember reading anything about that in the company handbook.’

  ‘Yah!’ Bard growled his hatred of the Oklahoma dirt-track that was trying to pass itself off as road. The Wichita Mountains loomed black and humped in the middle distance. A thin wind rattled the dry grass. ‘Who the hell would drill a place like this?’

  They drove on in silence, interrupted only by the violence of the car’s motion and a stream of muttered swearwords from Bard. Tom sat and thought about Rebecca. He’d become a real homebody now. He liked visiting his own oil facilities, but apart from that, he just liked being at home. At home with her. Who’d have guessed that he’d have turned out like that? The wanderer had come home. The thought made him grin.

  Eventually the track levelled off and the road surface improved.

  ‘All to see a lousy ginzo!’ said Bard.

  ‘You’re sure he speaks Italian?’

  ‘No, pal. Name like Marinelli, he speaks Swedish and eats … I don’t know, whatever the hell they eat in Sweden. Reindeer.’

  ‘And he’s reliable, right?’

  ‘I told you. He’s not your regular type of ginzo. Neatest guy for reaming a well I ever saw.’

  ‘Lyman, for Chrissake! I don’t want him to ream wells for me, I want to know he’s not going to play me for a sucker.’

  They came to a fork in the road, neither direction signed. Bard hit the brakes angrily and grabbed the map on the rear seat.

  ‘He’s straight. I already told you.’

  ‘OK. It’s important.’

  Bard spat out of the car door, then reached for a packet of cigarettes. His head, face and shoulders were covered in a fine grey dust. Where he’d lifted the packet of cigarettes, there was a dark mark left on the dashboard.

  ‘OK, pal. I’ll tell you how come I know he’s straight. In return, maybe you could tell me why all of a sudden you want a ginzo.’ He lit up and threw the match out of the open window into the dirt. ‘Back in ’twenty-five, we was working a new-fangled type of electric well out here in Oklahoma. No boiler. No steam. Just electrics. We hated it. I mean the thing was unlucky. It looked wrong, sounded wrong. The well belonged to some dumb-as-shit New York consortium who probably picked
the thing out of a book. Three thousand feet down, we get an escape of gas. We need to get the blowout preventer in, and fast. We’re kinda jumpy, but it’s going OK. Then the motor surges. It’s hot. There are sparks. Big blue sparks crackling through the air. We stare at them like dummies. Then – boom! – worst possible time, we have a full-scale blowout. The works. Oil, mud, water, gas. I seen wells take before, but this was a scorcher.’ He spat. ‘Shoulda stuck with steam. Slam-bam-an’-go-to-hell.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Tom grunted and reached for one of Bard’s cigarettes. ‘But Marinelli survived, right? I don’t have any use for a heap of Italian-speaking charcoal.’

  ‘Yeah, he’s OK. The guy was on fire, I run back in, haul him out. Don’t really know why, only I did. And that’s how I know he’s straight. He owes me. Them Catholic boys remember that kinda stuff.’

  ‘Excellent.’ Tom’s eyes gleamed with something dark. ‘You saved his life and he knows it.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Bard continued to wrestle angrily with his map, but Tom tapped him on the arm and pointed. Further down the valley, sticking up above the scraggy little oaks, there poked the unmistakable shape of a wooden-built oil derrick.

  ‘That must be Marinelli, over there.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me why you want a ginzo,’ said Bard, as he put the De Soto into gear and began to move off.

  ‘I’ve got a job for him.’

  ‘What kind of a job?’