Glory Boys (55 page)

So Pen ran.

She had always been fit, but today had been a challenge beyond anything she’d ever known. Feet, legs, arms, lungs all burned with the effort. But she did it.

She made it to Tin Can Field. She saw the plane while she was still four hundred yards away. A kind of tearful relief began to well up in her. And there was Abe, running towards her. She saw the steadiness in his face, the strength in his arms. The woman in her melted at the sight.

But then the pilot in her went dizzy with shock.

The plane stood at the wrong angle. Not badly wrong, but wrong enough. It was a tiny thing, but aviation is all about the tiny things. The way things stood at present, the plane would never take off.

119

Willard bent over the map.

The United States it portrayed was a colourless affair: all sandy yellows, dry pinks, stony whites, sombre blues – a true picture of Junius Thornton’s America. Next to the map was a book. It was leather-bound and unique. Only one copy of it existed and only one copy would ever exist. The book was three-quarters full, and each completed page was filled with the same handwriting: Junius Thornton’s close-set, over-inked, hard-to-read scrawl.

Willard knew now why he had been sent to Washington. It was the last part of his initiation. The drink in the Senate Library had been a carefully designed piece of theatre. This small black book was the final stage. Not theatre any longer, just business.

And what a business!

The book recorded the money and gifts handed by Powell Lambert to state and federal officials nationwide. The list was stupefying. On each page, there was the name of a state, then a date, then a list of names, job titles and amounts paid. Junius Thornton’s list-making was scrupulous. If a mink coat had been given to the wife of a particular official, then the gift was recorded along with a short description (‘floor-length, silver, gd quality’) as well as the dollar value. Names, dates, places, bribes began to blur in Willard’s head. He shifted in his seat, feeling dazed. His father saw the motion and came over. He tapped the map then traced a line that included the entire United States, excepting only Alaska and Hawaii.

‘There are forty-eight states here. Each state boasts a Prohibition Director charged with the implementation of Prohibition in their territory. Forty-eight states. Forty-eight Directors.’

Willard nodded. He knew that. Everybody did.

‘How many of those officers do you think have accepted money from us?’

‘How many?’

The older man didn’t even bother to nod, just held his son’s gaze remorselessly. Something in the intensity of the gaze confused Willard, making it hard for him to concentrate.

‘I don’t know, Pa. Those places where we looked like getting into trouble perhaps. Twelve, maybe? Fifteen? Twenty.’ He changed his answer a couple of times in an attempt to get a signal back from his father’s eyes, but there was no signal to be found. ‘Twenty. I’ll guess twenty.’

Junius Thornton spun the silence out a moment or two more, then looked away.

‘Forty-six. Every state of the union outside Indiana and Kentucky. The Directors in those two states earn $4,600 a year from their current positions. We offered them each $150,000 to step aside into a regular job. They rejected our offer. We are now working to get the two gentlemen replaced.’ The way he spoke was odd. He sounded contemptuous, weary. It didn’t sound like he was triumphant about the Firm’s success. It sounded like the only guys he had respect for were the two hold-outs in Indiana and Kentucky.

‘No, Pa, you’re kidding! No? You’re not? Really? Shee – shucks!’ Willard changed his expression from ‘sheez’, which his father detested, to ‘shucks’ which he only disliked. ‘Forty-six?’

His father closed the book and put it away. Silence filled the room. From the corner of the K Street office, it was just about possible to see the dome of the Capitol. It was a beautiful place, but a rotten one. Willard felt nothing but disgust. Disgust and disappointment.

Junius Thornton broke the silence.

‘Do you understand now, Willard?’

‘Huh?’

‘Do you understand?’

Willard paused before answering. He felt like he did understand. No wonder Powell Lambert drove everyone else off the streets. No wonder Ted Powell was happy to sit in New York and work his butt off – knowing full well that his partner was here in Washington doing the same.

‘Only one thing, Pa. Thornton Ordnance. I guess…’

Junius Thornton generally hated it when his son trailed off without completing a sentence, but on this occasion he nodded before Willard had finished.

‘Quite right, my boy. The arms business has always required intensive lobbying. Much of the success of any weapons company is related to the strength of its contacts.’

‘And that’s why…?’

‘Yes. Ted Powell had the finance organisation, but that wasn’t sufficient. He needed my network. And let’s be blunt. The purpose of lobbying is to make friends, but this is Washington, not the schoolyard. Money buys friends here. Nothing else. We buy our friends. We insist on loyalty. We expect it. We obtain it. The Firm succeeds because we do.’

‘And the Firm. I used to think that there were two separate outfits, Thornton Ordnance and Powell Lambert. I guess I was wrong there too.’

Junius Thornton shrugged abruptly. He was getting to the end of his desire for communication. ‘Legally, the two companies remain separate. But this is peacetime. With our nation in the mood it’s in, I can’t see us engaged in any war of consequence. Defence spending is low. If you want to know where the family’s profits come from, then it’s alcohol. Ninety-eight per cent.’

‘Yes, Father, then I understand.’

Willard nodded.

He should have felt good. This had been the final baptism. How many people in Powell Lambert knew about the black book he’d just seen? Ted Powell, of course. Dorcan Roeder, most likely. Quite likely no one else. Willard, the son of his father, had just been taken into the last bastion of trust, the innermost sanctum of the family Firm. But he didn’t feel good. Something sour lived in the room. A cynical odour that seemed to fill the city, that drained something good from the world.

His father nodded and said tersely, ‘Good. And by the way, you’ve had a telephone call. From your fiancée. You may wish to call back.’

‘Yes, of course. Did she say what she was calling about?’

Junius Thornton didn’t answer. He stood at the door, about to vacate his own office so his son could make his phone call in privacy. But there was something odd about his expression, his posture. One part of it was that he was leaving his own office: it almost looked as though the older man was backing out, leaving the younger man in charge. But that wasn’t it. He had asked
Do you understand now, Willard?
And Willard had answered
Yes, Father, then I understand
. But what was it they had been speaking about? The ultimate secret of the Firm’s success? Or their shared disgust at the men who took the money the Firm so generously offered them?

Willard didn’t know. He didn’t have to. He turned to the phone, made his call.

120

Abe looked at Pen. He saw she was tired, grazed and footsore, but basically OK. He saw – he had seen with his first glance, in fact – that she held four cloth-bound ledgers flat against her stomach. The documents that McBride wanted were, for the moment at least, safe and sound.

Pen, for her part stared at Abe. He was clearly safe. Whatever kind of landing he’d had, he’d walked out of it just fine. Pen remembered the old aviator’s saying, the one about a good landing being one you can walk away from. But then she looked at the plane. Its wheels had slid eight inches down into a ditch.

Eight inches. Maybe less. Maybe only six or seven. But that wasn’t the point. At its deepest, the ditch went down a full sixteen inches. Any attempt to roll her forwards over the ditch would only make matters worse. If they tried to roll her back again, they risked collapsing the soft-sided trench walls and burying the wheels, their chances and themselves all in one horrible moment. And in any case, why was Pen even thinking about moving the aircraft? De Havilland built the DH-4 as a fighter-bomber. It was a big plane, heavy enough to take a cargo of bombs. She looked at the plane, perfect but immovable. Misery filled her.

‘They’re coming,’ she said. ‘They tracked me here. I’m sorry.’

Abe nodded. He didn’t give her an answer directly, but his gaze travelled sideways. Pen saw a fallen palm trunk. For an instant she thought Abe must be thinking of the power of the coming storm – a storm that would soon be stripping palm trees and much else up and down the coast. Then she saw the drag marks, the sand scoured and flailed behind the trunk. She looked up, enquiringly.

Abe hesitated for a fraction of a second. He was never quite able to form a realistic picture of Pen’s mechanical ignorance. At times he didn’t explain things he thought were obvious, only to find that she was stumped by the problem. Other times he went the other way and decided she was so far beyond help that she needed the very simplest things explained, like how to use a screwdriver.

‘I’m going to lever her up as far as I can. But first we need to get something solid under her wheels. A bridge, if you like.’

‘A bridge, sure.’

Pen looked around as though hoping to find a highway bridge or a railroad bridge lying about somewhere on the camp site. Abe said nothing, just began shovelling sand and stones into the trench under the plane. Working quickly together, they filled in the ditch, so that there was solid earth coming to within an inch or so of the plane’s wheels.

‘OK. Now I’ll get ready to lever.’

For a second or so, Pen stood uncertainly. Out to sea, the huge storm crept closer and closer. Long ragged tails of wind were already beginning to slash the palm tops, and causing white-topped waves to throw long banners of foam and spray up onto the beach. Then she collected herself. She threw her ledgers in the plane, kicked off the bloody scraps of her remaining footwear and put on the flying boots Abe had brought for her. Her feet felt instantly more comfortable in the cushioned sheepskin. Meanwhile, Abe had his palm trunk in position now, threaded beneath the plane’s narrow axle.

‘I’ll lift,’ he said. ‘You get the stones under her when you can. I’ll lift one side first, then the other. Make sure your hands are clear when I start to lower.’

She nodded.

Abe wasn’t big, but he was strong. He placed the palm trunk under the right-hand wheel and lifted. He gained only an inch or two, but it was enough. Pen thrust some stones under the lifted wheel and kicked them into place. She was just reaching for another stone, when Abe grunted and shook his head. She snatched her hand away just in time before Abe’s strength gave out and he let the palm trunk and plane down with a judder. Then they repeated the same procedure with the other wheel.

They’d made two inches.

Pen wasn’t sure if two inches counted as success or failure, but Abe seemed happy. He rested for a moment, then shifted his palm trunk again.

They repeated the same sequence of actions – made another inch and a half and Pen had begun to think that perhaps they’d get the old girl out of the ditch yet – when disaster struck.

Starting to lever one more time, there was a loud crack as the palm trunk broke in half just three feet from the end. Abe had only just been able to lift the plane. With three feet cut from his lever, there was no hope of lifting the plane another inch. But Abe hadn’t stopped working, hadn’t stopped moving. He pointed to the storm and said, ‘When the storm hits, which way d’you reckon the wind’ll be coming from?’

The wind was already quite strong now, still gusty but never quiet even in the lulls. But Abe’s question made sense all the same. The windy outriders of a storm didn’t necessarily blow in the exact same direction as the winds concealed in the bosom of the storm itself. Pen focused on the bank of thundercloud now only a stone’s throw away. She concentrated on the question. She was a southern girl, born and bred, a pilot too. She knew her weather. She knew storms like these.

‘From there,’ she said, holding out her arm.

‘There exactly?’

She thought again, adjusted the angle of her arm a tiny bit, then nodded. The angle of her arm was fifteen degrees different from the angle of the airplane.

‘OK. Let’s get her moved.’

Then Pen saw it. And the moment she saw it, she was struck by a new wave of love so strong she could actually feel the pressure of it against her heart. Her lover wasn’t just a courageous man, not just a good one, there was a flash of genius in him, a spark of something so unusual that it was a privilege to be in its presence.

‘I’ve got you,’ she said. ‘Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.’

‘OK. I’ll move her. You dig her in. Just the tail skid. Make a bowl. A flattish bowl.’

Pen nodded. Just then, in a sudden gap of wind, there was the sound of cars. The two fliers looked at each other. They said nothing because there was nothing to say. There was only one reason why anyone should want to come to Tin Can Field now, and that wasn’t a reason either of them wanted to think about for long.

Abe gave a half-shrug, then went back to work, as Pen already had. She scooped out a wide flat hole in the sand. Abe used his palm trunk to lever the plane round and into the hole. The plane now had the correct attitude for takeoff: facing clear into the coming wind, her body level and her wings even.

Of course, the way take-offs normally happened, this plane stood no chance at all of taking off. Her front wheels were still a few inches down into a ditch. At the rear end, Pen had dug the tail skid into a hole. A flattish hole, to be sure, but planes like a level runway, they aren’t used to clambering out of foxholes.

But they had done all they could do. They finished just as the wind dropped from forty knots down to nothing. Except for the heavy smashing of the ocean, the world went suddenly silent. The sound of cars was unmistakable now. Cars arriving. Cars stopping. Car doors opening then slamming shut.

Meantime the huge curve of the thunderclouds was on top of them. Rearing ten or fifteen thousand feet in the air, the sheer immensity of the storm made them all – men, women, cars, plane – seem tiny, insignificant, as though the drama about to be played out mattered not at all.