Glory Boys (27 page)

Something in Rosalind’s face flickered. Perhaps this was true courage that she was seeing. Perhaps courage didn’t look the way people expected.

‘Have you got everything?’

Willard nodded. ‘Money. Passport. Clothes.’ He paused. Stowed carefully in a silk bag between the shirts in his suitcase, he had packed his old army-issue revolver and half a dozen clips of ammunition. ‘Gun.’

‘I wish you hadn’t spoken to that friend of yours.’

‘Hmm?’

‘That friend of yours from the bank, Larry Ronson.’

‘Oh, Larry!’ said Willard dismissively. The other night, the three of them had been taking a late supper together after work. Willard had been drunk and talkative. He’d scared Rosalind with his loose talk. He’d spoken about his upcoming Canadian trip – claiming it was to visit friends. He’d mentioned his travel plans, at least as far as Montreal. He’d even rambled a little about the shipment of furs coming south over the border – a shipment which Larry would have to look after in Willard’s absence. ‘Don’t worry about him.’

She fell silent, stroking the lines of his face with her fingers.

‘You will be careful, won’t you?’

‘Of course. To be honest, I need the holiday.’

She stepped closer. Something liquid moved in her eyes and mouth. Courage wasn’t just a characteristic she admired, it was one she loved. One that aroused her. Willard felt bad for a moment. He hadn’t told Rosalind about his meeting with Powell. He hadn’t told her about the files or the deductions he’d made as a result. It
was
brave what he was doing, but it wasn’t as brave as she thought. His conscience flared up, then died back again, under control as usual.

‘Your train? When do you have to…?’

Willard looked at his watch, then at the invitation in her eyes. Her hands were on his chest. Her mouth was slightly open, her eyes slightly closed.

‘Well, not right away, perhaps, not if you wanted…’

She wanted.

And twenty-six minutes later, still buttoning his coat, Willard went bursting downstairs, snatching his bag, running for his train. It would carry him north to Canada. He would come back victorious or come back dead.

56

The shower looked good: a huge tin plate with about a million holes nail-punched through it. The shower looked man enough to wash a regiment. Looked, but wasn’t.

The shower pipe ended about three feet from the shower head, which was dry enough for a gekko to be warming his belly upside down on it. Pen twizzled the faucet over the basin, with the same dry results. She grimaced and shouted down the hall for the boy to bring water.

There was a delay of about five minutes, then a small boy appeared carrying a huge bowl of tepid water. She thanked him in English and took the bowl. There wasn’t a curtain over the window, so Pen stood in the corner, stripped down to her underwear and washed as well as she could. Since she was now in Havana a fair amount, Pen had bought herself a basic wardrobe and she changed into a light cotton summer dress and a pair of pale pink flat-soled pumps.

She tipped the water away and carried the bowl back to the hotel kitchen, where she found herself a glass of lemonade and a packet of biscuits. She took her trophies to the bar, a dim prison-like room, mauve-painted, smelling of male bodies and spilled wine, lit by a couple of windows too high to see out of. A wooden ceiling fan stirred the air with an authentic Cuban dislike of doing anything too fast or effectively. Frank Lambaugh was there, Marion’s purchasing agent on the island. So too was Ayling Gann, the freighter captain, plus Raul Jiminez, the Cuban distributor for two of the Jamaican rum distillers.

‘Hi.’ Pen came in and sat down.

The men were drinking rum and shelling pistachios. Glancing at Pen, they nodded hello, but switched their conversation from English to Spanish.

‘This evening. Yes, this evening. It’s not my fault if the truck breaks down.’

‘It’s your truck.’

‘OK. You have the rum this evening.’

‘All of it?’

‘Yes, eighty cases. As agreed. Eighty.’

Lambaugh and Jiminez were arguing over a late delivery. Pen had mostly been brought up by the black servants on her father’s plantation, but for six years she’d had a Spanish-speaking nanny from Mexico. She could read, speak and understand Spanish with no more difficulty than she could English – a fact she’d so far kept hidden.

Lambaugh caught Pen’s eye.

‘Sorry, this must be boring for you.’

‘That’s OK. Don’t worry about it.’

‘I wasn’t worrying, I was just telling you sorry.’ He continued to hold her gaze.
‘I’d like to put you across this table and screw you right here, right now.’

‘Mind if I take some nuts?’ said Pen, not letting her expression waver. Ever since Abe had introduced her as his newest recruit, she’d experienced a wave of distrust, which in Lambaugh’s case had thickened to outright hostility. Booze-smuggling appeared to be a men-only sport. Flying certainly was. The idea of a woman flier escorting freighters up the Florida coast seemed to give everyone involved a severe case of woman-hating. It didn’t help that Mason had waved through the purchase of a second DH-4 without so much as a grumble over cost. Lambaugh pushed the nuts at her.

‘Help yourself.’

From that point on, Pen had felt Lambaugh’s distrust like a belt of high pressure, a problem aggravated by mutual dislike. But she didn’t mind. She was happy. For the first time in her entire life, she had work to do, work that mattered. The feeling was an intensely satisfying one. As a flier. As a woman. Her new role in life filled her with a quiet joy that all the Frank Lambaughs in the world wouldn’t be able to shake.

And as for the work, she took some photos, of course, but there was nothing illegal about handling booze in Cuba. The photos brought Bosse little or nothing that he could use. But Pen’s ears brought plenty.

Like today. Lambaugh and Jiminez were talking again. Jiminez was complaining that payments from Marion were being held up by the banks. Lambaugh’s domineering Spanish overrode Jiminez, mowing down his objections. And Pen listened, as she listened to everything.
Names of banks. Names of people. Payment arrangements. Payment amounts. Timetables. Contacts.
She’d write it all down, mail her statement to Bosse. Some days she learned little, other days plenty. But she was making progress.

Week by week. Day by day. Flight by dangerous flight.

57

Ruxion, Alberta.

November in Canada.

Black pines standing around a freezing lake. A tumble of grey rocks. A sprawl of wooden houses hunkered down by the water. A couple of fishing boats, pulled up against the ice. A wind sweeping down off the Rockies. A landing strip squeezed into the grassy margin between the lake and the hills. An aircraft that Willard didn’t recognise poking its nose out of a hangar crammed in amongst the pines.

He climbed out of the car, a De Soto that looked ancient, but maybe wasn’t. In that climate, it was hard to tell the difference.

‘Welcome to Ruxion,’ said the driver.

Willard pulled his coat closer and groped in the pocket for gloves. He wore his usual grey felt fedora, but found himself envying the rabbit-skin trapper’s hat which the driver wore pushed back on the crown of his head. The driver might have had a decent hat to put on, but he clearly wasn’t over-fussed about the cold. His waist-length plaid jacket was open right down the front. His flannel shirt wasn’t even buttoned the whole way. The driver noticed Willard fussing.

‘It ain’t proper cold yet,’ he said. ‘It don’t get real cold for another few weeks yet.’

Aside from a sour look, Willard didn’t reply. From Montreal, he’d travelled most of the way across Canada to Calgary, before taking a local train south to a nowhere-and-nothing stop on a nothing-and-nowhere railroad. The road from the stop had come all the way through Ruxion to the airstrip, where it ended in a big circle of churned dirt and bare grass. A couple of trucks sat, nosing the hangar wall like cattle feeding from a manger.

Willard hurried up the low slope to the grey door at the back of the hangar. A primitive electric generator driven by stream water churned away in the woods somewhere close. A neatly painted sign said, ‘Ruxion Trading Corp. Please use bell.’ There was no bell. There wasn’t even a catch on the door, which was only held shut because it hung crooked from a broken hinge. Willard shoved against the door, the driver close behind.

Inside was a second door, a wooden one, properly hung. Willard passed through into an interior of almost stifling heat. A cast-iron stove squatted burning hot against one wall, leaking red light and wood smoke in exchange for nearly all the available oxygen. There were three men present, one of them stretched out on a camp bed. The other two were playing cards for what seemed like a very small pile of money. A single dim bulb hung from a light cord. A hunting rifle, complete with a leather ammunition pouch, was slung from a couple of pegs over the camp bed.

‘Train was late,’ said the driver.

‘Yah! Figured,’ said one of the card players, throwing down his hand.

‘My name’s Thornton,’ said Willard. ‘From –’

‘Yah. Money man. Never expected to see one out here. ‘Course, it ain’t cold yet. Not real cold.’

‘I wanted to run a quick product inventory. We’ve been having some problems with our paperwork. Nothing major. Just wanted to check everything was in order.’

In that environment, Willard’s words sounded, even to himself, like something from another planet. His confidence in his plan had begun ebbing long before his arrival in Montreal, let alone his journey out here, to a place that seemed like the end of the known world. What if he’d been wrong about Powell’s coded message to him? What if Larry Ronson had been too drunk to take on board the information that Willard had been so careful to give him? What if he’d been altogether wrong about Ronson and whose side he was on? If he’d been able to, Willard would have run – but what was there to run to? A two-hundred-thousand-dollar loan. One man dead and another man jailed. A life of hard work, poverty, exhaustion and fear.

The card players exchanged looks with each other and the man on the camp bed. Willard felt a surge of anger. He shouldn’t even have to be here. He was frightened now, out of his depth, scared.

‘You want to poke around?’ The card player who’d spoken before spoke again.

Willard nodded. ‘It won’t take long.’

The men exchanged glances again. Willard didn’t understand the atmosphere and didn’t like his lack of understanding.

‘Sure,’ said the card player, the chatty one. ‘You need those?’

There was a stack of papers clipped together in a cardboard carton under the camp bed. The card player, Mr Chatty, as Willard christened him, shoved the carton at Willard, who looked at the bundle of papers inside. The first page was entitled ‘Northern Furs & Hides – Loading Bill, Goods in Transit’. There followed five pages of detail. Willard glanced at the uppermost page.

The paperwork corresponded to the documents that had passed Willard’s desk in Wall Street, only here, of course, the detail was much greater, every single box-load itemised and numbered. Willard was no accountant, but he felt pretty sure that the most scrupulous accountant in the world would have liked paperwork like that.

‘Looks good,’ he said, hearing himself adjust his Princeton rhythms to the monosyllabic speech of the men in the room. ‘I ought to check off a couple of boxes, if I can. No need to do ’em all.’

Mr Chatty jerked a finger at a second wooden door, set into the wall that separated the little office space from the hangar proper.

‘She’s loaded, you know.’

‘Loaded? Already?’

Mr Chatty shrugged. ‘Your train was late. We didn’t sit around crying.’

Willard opened the door. The hangar yawned huge and cold around him. He groped for a light switch and flicked it on. The pale Canadian sky was framed like a wide open mouth by the open wall on the far side of the building. The aircraft, a massive one, dominated the space. Willard estimated her wingspan at more than seventy feet, the upper wing pair a full eight or nine feet above the lower set. Her metal body bulged backwards from her nose. She looked like a submarine had ploughed forward into a set of airplane wings and become lodged. Not exactly nice-looking, thought Willard, but plenty of muscle. Even with fuel on board, she’d carry literally tonnes.

There was no way into the plane except via a wooden stepladder which leaned up against the side. Some gasoline-slopped steps further back showed how the aircraft was refuelled. A row of red ten-gallon fuel cans were ranged along the wall behind.

Willard climbed up into the cockpit. The instruments were more modern than those Willard had been used to, but the main difference from his old Nieuports and Spads was the cockpit itself. On this monster, the cockpit was entirely closed off from the sky. It had a metal-skinned roof and thick glass windows. Willard thought how strange it must be to fly and not feel the wind. But he wasn’t here to compare planes. He was here to check boxes.

He clambered back into the hold and looked at his first box. A number chalked on the side corresponded to a number in the loading bill: a consignment of beaver skins. The box was put together from pine boards and nailed shut, but Willard had brought some basic tools up from the hangar, including a crowbar. Willard wrenched the lid of the box open, gashing his palm. He swore and probed the box with a flashlight.

It was beaver skin all right. Or at least, if it wasn’t, then some other bunch of small furry animals had died to fill the box. Willard shoved his hand down to the bottom of the crate. He found beaver skin all the way. Fear prickled through Willard’s skin, he didn’t know why. He assaulted another box. Blood dripped from his open wound first onto the wooden case, then onto Willard’s trouser leg. He swore again but got the second box open. This one wasn’t dead beavers, it was dead something elses. Willard checked his list. Arctic fox. The silvery fur shone blue in the torchlight. Willard thought of Annie: he’d jokingly promised to bring her back a coat from this trip. Her presence seemed real and close. Rosalind, strangely enough, he could hardly even picture.