Glory Boys (43 page)

‘Good. That’s what we wanted to achieve. That’s all we ever wanted to achieve.’

‘Really, Captain. You’re sure?’

‘Damn right, I’m sure.’

Bosse nodded and sat back as though satisfied by Abe’s answer. Only McBride continued to sit forwards. Abe suddenly realised that he’d been wrong to assume that Bosse was in charge. The power-chemistry suddenly flipped, and Abe realised that all along it hadn’t been Bosse, but the younger-looking McBride who was running this show. If he’d bothered to look at it earlier, McBride’s business card would have told him as much: Haggerty N. McBride, Director, Special Investigations Unit. The sudden shift of authority in the room was unsettling, as was that as-yet-undetonated
if.

McBride took a cookie from the plate, crumbled it in his hands, but didn’t put it anywhere near his mouth. Outside, a gull screamed with sudden loudness beyond the window.

‘Captain, let me ask you a question,’ said McBride. ‘In your opinion, is Robert Mason the head of an entire organisation or merely the head of one of its important subsections?’

Abe went still. The room went still. Strange though it seemed to admit, it was a question Abe and the others had never really considered before. Hennessey had asked Abe to destroy Marion. Abe and the others had pretty much fulfilled that brief. What lay on beyond Marion was a question to which Abe didn’t attach a lot of importance. But his answer, when it came, was unhesitating.

‘The volume of alcohol we shift. It’s vast. It’s enough to supply entire cities. Large ones. If Mason acts independently, then he’s got some pretty good buddies in the business … but no, on balance no, I don’t think he’s independent. I guess he takes his orders from someplace else.’

McBride nodded.

‘We think so too.’

Abe shot a glance sideways at Pen and Hennessey. Their faces were carefully impassive, but he guessed their feelings must be in as much tumult as his.

‘I’m afraid that’s not my business, McBride. Hennessey here asked for help freeing up Independence from an unpleasant neighbour. We set out to do that. And only that.’

McBride made a courteous gesture with his hands that didn’t mean a whole lot. ‘Like I say, that’s fine. If you want us to go ahead with what we’ve got, we’ll get things moving right away.’

That
if
again. The word didn’t improve with repetition.

‘And why wouldn’t I want you to go ahead?’

McBride sat back, appeared to notice the cookie crumbled half to powder in his hand and dusted it off onto the plate.

‘In our view, you have broken into one of the most important criminal organisations in the country. Perhaps the largest and the most important. You’ve busted one of their major import routes right open. But these documents suggest to us that there’s a whole lot more to do. Suppose we smash Marion? Hit it so hard it never grows back? Mr Hennessey, you’d get your town back. Captain, Miss Hamilton, you’d be able to get on and live your lives knowing you’d done a great and courageous thing. But you’d know, all of you, that someplace else, unknown to you and unknown to us, another Marion was being built. An organisation like this isn’t just gonna throw in its hand. It’ll rebuild. There’ll be more mobsters. More guns. More booze. More violence. In the end, we’ll have shifted the problem, not eliminated it. That’s why I say
if.
But it’s up to you. Few people could have accomplished as much. Perhaps nobody would choose to do more.’

Outside the room, waves beat up on the white Naples shoreline. Gulls pulled stunts in the air. The old wood of the hotel creaked and settled.

McBride spoke again. ‘I haven’t been specific. I ought to be. What we are asking is for you to deliver the entire organisation to us. Not just the right hand, but the head and the heart as well. We want to smash not a sub-unit of the organisation, but the organisation itself. To do that, we’ll need to connect Marion to the headquarters. We’ll need enough evidence to obtain search and arrest warrants. Those warrants will give us enough further evidence to do the rest.’

‘You say you want to connect Marion to the centre…?’

‘Money. There’s only one way to do that meaningfully and that’s by tracing the flows of money. Bank transfers between business units. And we would need the documents themselves. We can make witnessed copies ourselves and return the originals to you, but no Morse code, no light bulbs, no handwritten copies, no witnesses making a confession under duress.’

Abe thought about his little team. Gibson Hennessey, Pen Hamilton, Arnie Hueffer, Brad Lundmark. Hennessey had only ever asked for help in claiming Independence back from the mob. He wanted peace and quiet to return to town, maybe a little prosperity too. He hadn’t wanted to clean up America. He hadn’t asked for Abe to do that.

And meantime, Abe’s Atlantic dream sprang up at him with renewed force. He could almost feel the shudder of a metal wing ripping through a North Atlantic gale. He could see the dirty weather battering the windscreen, hear the howl of an engine out-screaming the winds. He couldn’t wait any longer to devote himself to that dream. He couldn’t bear any longer to devote himself to an objective which wasn’t really his.

He shook his head, just once but with absolute decision.

‘I’m sorry, McBride. I’ve done what I was asked to do. And that’s it. That’s where I stop. I’ve reached my limit.’

Pen heard those words through a fog.

He was giving up. He was moving on. Having done something brilliantly, he was abandoning it unfinished. With the vital exception of his wartime career, he was doing what he’d always done: running away. And it was in that moment then Pen knew something else as well: that it was useless for her to love him. He’d never give her what she wanted. The greatest man she’d ever met was also, strange to say it, a coward.

Her eyes dazzled with tears. He would never love her, she realised now, not because she wasn’t the right girl for him, but because he was too much of a coward to commit himself. It seemed like the worst reason in the world, but also the most final. Her grief was so strong, she was hardly able to speak.

89

The port decanter shone dully in the candlelight.

It was late in the evening. The women, including Rosalind, had already retired to the drawing room, in the English style. There were a few house guests staying for the weekend, but one or two had gone to bed, another trio had headed off to the billiard room. There were only four men left at table: Willard, his father, and two young men who were here as guests of Willard’s middle two sisters. Junius Thornton didn’t drink much and never got drunk. Willard had drunk plenty but was practised enough to hold it. The other two men had drunk excessively and were slumped staring at the candlesticks on the long mahogany table, trying to keep the two dozen candle flames from blurring into four or even six dozen.

Junius Thornton glanced contemptuously at the two youngsters, then got up heavily to take a couple of cigars from the sideboard. He handed one to Willard, and the two men, father and son, shared the ritual of preparing then lighting the tobacco. They inhaled, let their dinner jackets fall open, sat back, stretched out.

‘The war,’ said Junius.

‘Yes, Father?’

‘That conversation at dinner. I didn’t ask what you thought.’

‘No.’

The conversation had been a rare one. In these days of peace, it had almost become as though the war had happened in a previous century or to a different country. Mentions of it were rare; discussions still rarer.

All the same, it had happened. Abby, a girlfriend of Willard’s youngest sister, had been speaking about the negotiated Armistice of November 1918, which many in the American army had been fiercely opposed to. ‘How could anyone have wanted that terrible war to have lasted a second longer?’ she’d cried. ‘Every day young men were being killed. Think of them! Think of their poor families!’

Her speech had been followed by a half-second of silence. Then Junius had spoken, his tone of voice ended the conversation as firmly as his words.

‘The consequences of aggression must always be brought home to the aggressor. Germany needed to feel the pain of invasion and defeat on her own soil. Though the English and the French lacked the stomach to continue, they may yet regret their timidity.’

Willard nodded to indicate that he remembered the conversation. His father said, ‘Well? What is your opinion of the question?’

‘Well, I mean I can see what Abby meant. After all, it was one thing in the Army Air Corps. It was dangerous enough, but at least it was quite civilised. It was quite different for the poor soldiers on the ground. They lived underground, little better than rats, really, not to speak of the danger and the bloodshed, the endless mud, the guns going off around them all the time… But then again, Papa, I think you’re right. If a person starts a thing, he needs to finish it. Properly finish it. I’m not sure we ever really did,’ he concluded, pleased with himself.

Since joining Powell Lambert – and especially since being elevated to the heights of the Investment Bureau – Willard had become more decisive, more single-minded. Although he could still become tongue-tied or excessively talkative with his father, the problem now was nothing like as bad as it had been. His father seemed to agree with him, nodding his head sharply twice in a gesture of assent.

‘The Firm – Thornton Ordnance, that is; Powell Lambert didn’t exist back then – the Firm spent five and a half million dollars seeking to persuade people that an unconditional surrender by the Germans was the only acceptable outcome. Five and a half million dollars. If we could have spent more to any effect, we would certainly have done so.’

‘Gosh, Father! Five and a half million dollars!’

Willard spent a moment trying to imagine how that vast sum of money had been spent – who had taken it? And in exchange for what promises? – but he failed entirely.

‘It wasn’t much. At that time, the Firm was earning eighteen million dollars a month in net profit. Each further day of combat was worth approximately half a million dollars. The arithmetic was not difficult to perform.’

Willard tried to get his head around his father’s way of thinking and failed – then tried again, and succeeded; or almost succeeded; or achieved something that felt like succeeding. Willard thought of his father’s utter commitment to success, his blunt attitude to violence.
And perhaps he’s right,
he thought.
Perhaps Europe and America would now be more secure if the victory had been clearer. Perhaps Powell Lambert’s ruthlessness does mean a cleaner, better organised, less anarchic industry.

In any case, something had suddenly become clear. He had been firm in Marion, but not yet firm enough. It was no use waiting to see if Rockwell was a danger or not. The man had to be pushed. He had to be provoked into revealing his intentions. And Willard realised he knew how to do it. He stood up abruptly.

‘I’m sorry, Father. I’ve just realised I’ve got a call to make. Right now. Business.’

The older man nodded. The ghost of a smile hung on his heavy features, looking as permanent and appropriate as a lace handkerchief on a lump of granite. ‘Good boy. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Willard made his call, waking Mason but not caring. Willard said what he had to say. Mason understood the first part of it, not the second, but agreed to get both parts done in any case. Willard hung up and walked slowly back to the drawing room, looking forward to seeing Rosalind’s slim grey-gold beauty again after the black-and-white sombreness of the exclusively male company.

For another two hours that evening, he was dazzling, lively, the centre of an adoring family’s attention. And it was only when he went upstairs to get ready for bed that night, that a thought struck him.

His father had spent five and a half million dollars trying to procure the extension of the war. If he could have spent more usefully, then he would have done. But his son, Willard, had been in a front-line combat unit, flying as a pursuit pilot. And of all the bloody and dangerous occupations in a bloody and dangerous war, then perhaps the pursuit pilots had the most bloody and dangerous job of all. To put it bluntly, each day of war increased not insignificantly the chance that Willard wouldn’t survive it. His father had presumably considered the matter, then made his decision.

And as he’d said, the arithmetic had hardly been difficult to perform.

90

Sam Skeddings was quite a guy.

He wore silk shirts in bright colours. He had a rack of neckties to match. He was six foot two and had a handspan that could curl all the way round a fat man’s neck. He wore a gun in a shoulder holster and carried three hundred bucks cash in his hip pocket. If he wanted a girl, he got her. If he opened a bottle of whiskey at the start of an evening, he threw it away empty at the end. If he fired a gun, somebody dropped back dead. That was Sam Skeddings. He was quite a guy and both he and his employer, Robert Mason, knew it.

The first part of his assignment was the regular type of thing. Take a big car up the hill to Independence. Shoot the place up a little, but the storekeeper’s house in particular. The instructions were quite specific. Nobody was to be killed, but the storekeeper had to be badly frightened. So Skeddings did as he was told. He picked a small group of men, then went straight up the hill and shot the place up. They shot out windows, damaged woodwork, entered the store itself and wrecked the place. Then they ended by aiming their Tommy guns high through the shattered windows and blazing away non-stop until their firing pins came clicking down on empty air.

But that wasn’t the strange part of the assignment. The strange part was this.

After the shooting, he had been instructed to go back into town. Not in a big black car with Tommy guns poking out of the windows. But quietly. At noon. On foot. And he’d been asked to find out – figure this – to find out what kind of laundry the storekeeper’s wife had been doing.

‘You want me to look at her smalls?’ he’d asked Mason, outraged.

‘Buster, I need you to count the frills on ’em.’