Aces (30 page)

When he was sixteen, and had to leave the farm, the people there arranged a job for him as an office boy for the Tulsa Western
Union office. The job paid enough for him to support himself and also take night school courses in bookkeeping and accounting.
He worked and studied in Tulsa for a year. During that time he heard a lot about California and decided to go there to seek
his fortune. He tried to arrange a transfer to the Western Union office in San Francisco, but there were no openings available,
so he settled for the office in Los Angeles.

It was 1916. He was seventeen, but looked and acted much older in his somber suit and tie, and a boiled white shirt with a
detachable celluloid collar. Within a month of his arrival he landed a job as a teller at Pacific Coast Bank.

He resumed taking night courses, intent upon receiving a college degree in accounting. He celebrated his eighteenth birthday
by going to the Flower Street Cafe, which was around the corner from the Los Angeles State Normal School, where he was taking
courses, and treating himself to a steak dinner before his accounting class.

He sat at the counter, where he was served by a slim, dark-haired waitress with big blue eyes and a shy smile. It was a slow
night, so while he ate she chatted with him. He told her that it was his birthday. She told him her name was Agatha Wilcox.

She asked him if he wanted dessert. He said that he didn’t have enough money, so he’d skip dessert and tip her instead, because
she’d been sweet enough for him. She laughed, and gave him a slice of blueberry pie on the house to go with his coffee. While
he ate the pie she sang “Happy Birthday” to him.

He began stopping into the cafe every night for coffee before class. After a couple of weeks like that, she invited him to
come for Sunday dinner at her parents’ house in east Los Angeles. He understood what she was getting at, and decided that
was okay with him. He began spending every Sunday with her. He would stop by at her house and spend a quarter-hour with her
parents, and then he and Aggie would take the trolley to Santa Monica Beach, where they’d stroll the boardwalk, holding hands;
dreaming and laughing together about the future, serenaded by the crashing waves and squawking gulls. They were ready to get
married, but decided to wait. Her parents’ house was too small for Campbell to move in once they were married. Between their
meager salaries they weren’t earning enough to both rent a decent apartment of their own and pay for Campbell to continue
his education.

When the United States entered the war, Campbell was drafted, but the army turned him down as physically unfit due to an irregular
heartbeat. He was very relieved. When he was twenty, after three years at Pacific Coast Bank, he was promoted to head teller.
The increase in salary made marriage possible, at long last. He formally proposed to Agatha at the beach, and she accepted.
After they were married they took a small bungalow apartment near the campus so that she could be near her waitressing job
and he could quickly and easily come home from night school after his day at the bank.

Money was tight, but it was a happy time. Campbell enjoyed being married. During lovemaking they were as careful as they could
be, but, as it turned out, not careful enough. Before their first anniversary had come around, Aggie was pregnant.

The pregnancy was difficult for Agatha. Her ankles swelled up so that she couldn’t stand for very long at one time, and that
put the kibosh on her waitressing. Their first child was a boy, whom they named Timothy, Junior.

In order to make ends meet, in addition to his job at the bank, and night school, Campbell worked weekends selling brushes
door-to-door. It turned out that he was good at selling. After the war, when automobiles resumed rolling off the assembly
lines, he quit the brush job in order to work weekends selling Fords. The owner of the dealership tried to convince him to
come into the business full-time. Campbell discussed the opportunity with Aggie, but she was against it. She felt that he
could become an important officer at the bank, but that meant he had to push on with school.

He had a talk about his future with his supervisor at the bank. His supervisor took the matter up with his own supervisors.
A few days later Campbell was told that if and when he received his bachelor’s degree in accounting, he would be promoted
to junior loan officer.

His son was almost two years old, and Agatha was again pregnant, when Campbell finally earned his college degree in 1923.
The bank kept its word, moving him out of his teller’s cage to behind this desk, among the desks of the other junior loan
officers the bank employed. A couple of months later, Aggie presented him with another son, whom they named Donald.

That had been a little less than two years ago. During that time Campbell saved his pennies until he was able to put down
a thousand on a two-bedroom bungalow. Money was tight as ever. Aggie was talking about taking a stenographer’s evening course
and going to work part-time as a secretary once the boys were old enough to go to school. Campbell knew that it would be another
three years, at least, before he could even begin to think about the possibility of being promoted to senior loan officer
at a major financial institution such as Pacific Coast Bank.

If
he stayed…

Campbell stubbed out what was left of his cigarette in the ashtray on his desk, stood up, and stretched. He put on his shoes
and suitcoat, packed up the files on Gold Aviation, and slipped them into his briefcase. He’d go over them at home, in bed,
while Aggie slept, fine-tuning the presentation he’d make to Gold tomorrow.

The night watchman unlocked the side door for him. Campbell stepped out into the night and walked the block to where his tan
Plymouth coupe was parked.

He looked at the car a moment before he got in. He’d bought it used. The backseat upholstery had a gash in it. God, he hated
used stuff!

According to the files, Gold drove a Stutz and his wife had a brand-new Packard roadster—

A Packard would do just fine, Campbell thought, grinning. He worked the Plymouth’s starter. After a few tries it caught, and
he pulled away.

He intended to be a wealthy man. Up until today, he’d thought that a career in banking was the way to go about it. Now that
he’d taken a look at Gold Aviation, he thought he’d found a better way.

After his telephone conversation with Campbell, Gold decided to go to bed. He went through the house, shutting off lights
and checking the doors. Upstairs, in the hallway outside the bedroom, he hesitated, realizing that he didn’t want to face
that big lonely bed all by himself…

He went back downstairs, trudging through the shadowy house into the living room, where he kicked off his loafers and stretched
out on the couch. He glanced at his wristwatch’s luminous dial: it was almost eleven. After an interminable while spent tossing
and turning, he drifted off into a dream: He was back at his terminal facility at Mines Field on the day of the airplane crash.
Teddy Quinn wasn’t there, but Tim Campbell was, chattering away about something Gold couldn’t quite comprehend as he walked
amidst the wreckage of his crashed airplane. The scene of the crash had taken on the appearance and dimensions of a World
War I battlefield. Burned bodies and drifting smoke were everywhere, stretching as far as Gold could see. It seemed to him
that all of this carnage was his fault, and then he realized that Erica and his children had been on the airplane, flying
to Nebraska.

The air was filled with the raw smell of spilled gasoline—

He woke up abruptly, tense and sweating. He blamed the dream, but then he realized that he was sure that he had heard something
that had disturbed his sleep.

He checked the time: quarter of four in the morning. Far too early for Ramona to have returned. Could he have heard a prowler?
The dream vanished from his mind as he lay quietly, ears straining, eyes staring into the darkness.

He heard the noise again. Soft sounds of thin metal warping, and liquid sloshing. Was he merely hearing the plumbing in his
house? No, the sound was coming in through the open windows facing the garden.

He suddenly realized that he was still smelling gasoline.
Really
smelling it.

Then he recognized what he’d been hearing. He’d heard it only about a thousand times during his career as a pilot. It was
the sound of gasoline being poured from a fuel can.

He sat up, stepped into his shoes, and moved quietly to the windows facing out onto the garden. It was a cloudy night, with
just a sliver of bone-colored moon, but there was enough light for Gold to see that somebody was near the side of the house,
up to something.

Gold went to the fireplace, gripped the poker, and then hurried to the French doors leading out into the garden. Beside the
doors was the wall switch that controlled the garden lighting. He flicked the switch, wrenched open the glass door, and rushed
out, wielding his poker.

The prowler had been in the process of sloshing gasoline against the side of the house from a red and yellow five-gallon can.
He was tall and fat, dressed in gray, baggy pants, and a dark brown corduroy jacket. He had blond hair curling out from beneath
his tweed, visored cap. He hurled his candy-colored gas can at Gold, who sidestepped it, but gasoline splashed onto him; his
shirt was soaked. The gasoline felt cold evaporating against his skin as he moved toward the prowler.

The prowler took a wooden kitchen match from out of his pocket and flicked it alight with his thumbnail. Gold stopped, staring
at the sputtering little flame, aware of the gasoline from his soaked shirt dripping on his shoes.

The prowler smiled. “Come on, Jewboy—” He had a broad, bulbous nose, colored an angry red and broken out with pimples. “Come
on, Kike… I’ll fry you, then do the house and the wife and kiddies.”

He lunged forward, tossing the lighted match toward Gold, who cried out, stumbling back from the lethal spark of flame darting
toward him. The match winked out in midair, but while Gold was distracted the prowler escaped. He was startlingly light on
his feet for such a large man. He dashed for the high stockade fence, and then hoisted himself up and over. He was gone.

Gold dropped the poker. He stripped down to his underwear, ran to where the garden hose was connected to the outside spigot,
and turned it on. He washed himself down and then took his time soaking down the wall of the house, the grassy area around
it, and wherever the gas had spilled, making sure that he had washed it all away. He locked the prowler’s gas can in the garage
and then went back into the house, where he turned on all the lights. He took the fireplace poker with him to the upstairs
bathroom and took a shower, shampooing his hair to wash away the last traces of gasoline. Still damp, he put on a terrycloth
robe and slippers, took his poker, and went back downstairs, into his study. He unlocked a built-in wall cabinet, took out
a bottle of the genuine scotch that he had regularly delivered by a local bootlegger, and poured himself a stiff drink. He
swallowed it down, grimacing, and then poured himself another. He took it, and the poker, over to his desk. He sat down, and
stared at the telephone.

Of course, the thing to do was call the police. His home had been invaded, with an intent to commit arson. He himself had
been assaulted.

Gold stared at the telephone, but did not pick it up. He could certainly describe the prowler to the police, but what were
the odds that the cops would catch the bastard?

He sipped at his scotch. The police probably wouldn’t even look at that hard. Gold could hear them now—

This was regrettable, Mister Gold, but, surely you’re aware that there’s a great deal of this sort of thing going around…
We’ll keep our eyes open, but don’t count on too much… The most important thing is that you’ve suffered no injury, and that
your property was unharmed… By the way, Mister Gold, have you ever considered getting yourself a watchdog?

And with the police would come the reporters. Gold could hear them, as well.

Why did this happen, Mister Gold? Who are your enemies? There are lots of Jews, why did he pick on you? Do you think he had
a motive, Mister Gold? Maybe he had a friend or relative who died on your German airplane when it blew up?

Inevitably, one of the newshounds would imply that tonight’s incident
hadn’t
happened; and that Gold had fabricated it in a desperate attempt to counter the bad publicity and drum up public sympathy
for himself. It was not at all far-fetched to think that by tomorrow’s editions, the newspapers would have turned the whole
thing around to make it seem as if Gold had tried to torch his own home in a last-ditch effort to salvage his business…

And when it was all over and done, with the would-be arsonist free, and Gold himself further humiliated and discredited, how
many more crazies would be given the idea to do exactly the same thing, either to him, or other Jews?…

He looked at his watch. It was five-thirty. He went and poured himself some more scotch. An hour later he was still in his
study, drinking and brooding, the poker within reach, when he heard the sound of a motor in the driveway. Ramona had arrived
for the day. When he heard her key in the front door, Gold went upstairs to get dressed. When he came down, Ramona was waiting
for him.

“
Señor
,” she began. “On the fence in front of your house, someone has written,” she hesitated, frowning, “oh, they have written
terrible things…”

He went outside to take a look.
KIKES LIVE HERE/JEWS ALL DIE/CHRIST-KILLERS
was scrawled across the stockade fence in ugly, black letters a foot tall. Gold stared, his fists clenched and his heart
pounding in his chest. He wanted to strike back, to hurt somebody—anybody—to relieve all of the hurt and frustration he was
feeling.

He went back inside. “Ramona, call the handyman and ask him to come and remove that.”