Glory Boys (63 page)

‘Willard,’ he said carefully, as though it was only his son who had entered.

‘I’m sorry, Father.’

‘Sorry? For what are you sorry?’

Willard said nothing. Junius Thornton stared at his son with a face of thunderclouds over ocean. He too said nothing. When the cops came forward with the cuffs, he shot his wrists out wordlessly, his gaze unwavering from Willard’s face.

It was a strange gaze. All the things that Willard had expected to see there – fury, contempt, fear, rage, even brutality – were completely absent. Partly it was just the old man’s habit of clearing his face of visible emotion. Partly, it was Willard’s age-old difficulty in making any real connection with his father. But in the weeks and months that followed, Willard had decided he’d seen something else too; something that was very far removed from brutality; something a little like respect.

But it was only a moment. The cuffs were snapped on to the big man’s hands, and he was pushed away, out of the room. Willard asked the one remaining cop to leave, so that only he and the two senators were left. Wordlessly, Willard went to his father’s desk and took from it the small black book with its list of names and gifts that he and almost nobody else in the world had ever seen. He gave it to the senior of the two senators.

‘What you do with this is up to you, senator. I hope you use it well.’

After that, time and events had slid into confusion.

Everyone else in the building was either placed under arrest, or herded into a single room and held under guard. Then they just waited. After an hour or so, Roeder returned back with a couple of men. They weren’t expecting any trouble in their own offices, so they simply walked straight in and into the hands of the waiting cops. They too were arrested. After that, more of Roeder’s men arrived and were arrested. Then some cops bringing the paper evidence retrieved from the fire service arrived. They too were asked to stay. Then somehow word got out, and a cluster of newspaper men began to form. One of the senators went out in front of the popping flashbulbs and made an oration. The radio airwaves began to fill with the story.

But Willard avoided the public clamour. He went back to the Senate, where he spent four days solid, telling everything he knew. There were at least three policemen present the entire time, plus at least two senators, sometimes more. Willard told everything without reserve. He told enough to damn his father, Ted Powell, Bob Mason, Dorcan Roeder, as many of his former colleagues as he could incriminate.

And himself. He damned himself a dozen times over. Afterwards, his lawyer told him he should have secured immunity from prosecution before saying a word. But Willard had been talking for two days solid before he even thought to get a lawyer, and by that time it was far, far too late. But he didn’t mind. Genuinely not. In a strange way, as the prosecutions began to unfold in a roar of publicity, Willard began to feel himself connected to his father, for the first and perhaps last time. They had both done wrong. They would both face jail.

And, unlike his father or Ted Powell or Dorcan Roeder or any of the rest of them, Willard knew he would be treated leniently. He had sinned, of course, but he was, beyond question, the hero of the whole adventure. Neither Abe nor Pen had wanted to draw attention to their role in things. McBride and Bosse were both dead, Judge Styles was hardly a factor. So Willard was the hero. His handsome face was once again one of the best known faces in America. More famous now than he’d ever been, no court in the land would have put him away for the maximum term. He’d been sentenced to two and a half years and was expected to serve just sixteen months. The prison was bad, but even there Willard found himself curiously respected, even popular.

And he was engaged to Annie.

When he came out of prison, they’d marry. Although his family was still very rich, none of the money would come to him now. His mother had refused to visit him in jail. Of his four sisters, only two had yet visited and even then had spent half their time recriminating. So when Willard came out, he’d be just a regular guy: famous, of course; a figure heaped around with the nation’s praise; but not rich. Any money that came his way, he’d have to go and earn himself, dollar by dollar.

Sometimes, during the long and empty prison nights, Willard found himself feeling regret. But not most nights. And not by day. Most of the time, with most of himself, Willard was happy; proud and happy. He knew that Abe was proud of him too.

No matter where it may be, every airfield in the world feels the same as every other. And that’s how it ought to be. Because a runway is only a jumping-off point for the sky and the sky is always the same and always different, no matter which part of the world it may cover.

The wind skittered in the dry grass, making a low moaning over the airplane’s metal wings. Metal, because Abe’s new plane was an all-metal monoplane. It was a high-wing, single-engine machine. It was a shape that had first been designed from Abe and Arnie’s experiments with the water-chute. When the engineers had translated the plans into a life-size model, the plane had beaten all previous wind-tunnel records for an aircraft of its size.

Arnie Hueffer fussed around the airplane. A fuel tanker had accidentally splashed mud on the plane’s nose cone. Tiny splashes, the sort of thing that nobody in the world would care about. Except that Arnie did. Because every splash of mud made for a tiny imperfection in the way the plane flew. And this plane was currently in New York and aimed to fly non-stop right from here to Paris, France. The journey would weigh in at over three thousand, six hundred miles and would, if successful, set a new world record.

But it was more than that.

The flight wasn’t about records, it was about showing that there were no horizons in aviation. None. No barriers to what was possible. Oceans could be crossed. Continents could be joined. Trade could knit countries together. The world could be made a safer, wealthier, better place.

Pen stamped her feet in the cold.

They had got engaged, she and Abe. They hadn’t wanted to make a big deal out of it. They’d made their announcement quietly, while the newspapers were full of ballyhoo about Willard Thornton and Powell Lambert. But all the same, the announcement had made a splash. How could it not have done? America’s greatest war hero to marry the country’s leading female flier? Then throw in the attempt to snatch the Orteig Prize and the story became an irresistible one.

So Pen stamped her feet, which weren’t shod as she liked them to be, in flying boots below leather trousers. Her feet now had to look pretty and wife-like for the waiting cameras. Her comments had to be just right for the throng of waiting newspaper men.

But there was something that the newspaper guys didn’t know. Something that nobody in the world knew except her and Abe. And that was this. In the weeks and months of final preparation for the flight, the risks that Abe was choosing to undertake had become progressively more obvious. There was so much that could go wrong. The plane was a flying fuel tank. What if there was a leak? A spark? What if headwinds were worse than expected? What if he lost course by a degree or two? What if he fell asleep? In the journey across the sea, the engine would fire approximately fourteen million times: fourteen million opportunities for something to go wrong. Nobody knew if the engine could do it. Nobody knew if a single man could do the job.

And that fact had begun to weigh on them both. They were engaged. They would shortly be married. The plan was to raise children, be a family. And flying the ocean was a risk that no responsible family man should ever take.

One day the whole business had come to a head. Abe had come back from the engine manufacturers, shaking his head. He’d had some story about firing ratios, carbon buildup, poor test results – Pen couldn’t follow the tale.

‘So what?’ she’d said. ‘Get it fixed.’

‘Maybe it’s not fixable. Not by me, anyhow.’

Pen opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. She understood her fiancé well enough by now, and she had seen straight through him. She felt very sad and very moved.

‘There’s nothing wrong with the engine, is there?’

Abe opened his mouth to protest, but then just shook his head. ‘The tests are fine.’

‘I thought so.’

‘Listen, if it’s not me, it’ll be some other guy. Aviation doesn’t need me to do it. Aviation doesn’t much care who does it. I’ve got other things to care about now.’

‘Me.’

‘You, and the kids we’ll have. What kind of a father would go fly the ocean? What kind of a husband?’

Pen’s sadness increased, but she knew what she was about to do and knew that she would never regret doing it.

‘Then I can’t marry you,’ she said. ‘I’ll not be the one to stop you flying. And please don’t argue. You will never get me to change my mind.’

Abe had argued and he never showed his love for Pen more than he did by arguing as hard as he did. But Pen never budged. And she was right. The world had plenty of husbands and plenty of fathers. It didn’t hold a whole lot of men like Abe.

But the newspapers knew none of this. Wanting to avoid the furore that a break-up announcement would create, the two of them had decided to say nothing. As far as the world was concerned, Abe and Pen were still the perfect husband- and wife-to-be.

Abe was ready now. He was dressed in his flying clothes. He had a pile of sandwiches and a flask of coffee in the cockpit, along with his maps and navigation instruments. The wind was set fair. The horizon was clear. Weather reports from Newfoundland, Cork, London and Paris were all sound.

Pen didn’t want him to go. Part of her, of course, wanted him to change his mind, come back to her, restart their future.

But that was only a part of her. The rest – most of her – did want him to go. Why did she love Abe, after all? She loved him because he was the sort of man who had to do these things. Who had to fly, had to travel, had to push hard against the limits of God and the sky. Pen felt proud of being the one who had found him and set him free. Proud and happy as well as also sad.

Abe hugged her. She hugged him back. They kissed. Flashbulbs popped. They offered a second kiss for the cameras, then turned away and kissed privately and longingly for themselves alone.

‘Break a leg,’ she whispered, using the old good-luck message from the war.

‘We’ll be fine.’

She nodded. ‘I know you will.’ She meant it.

They kissed one last time, then stepped back. Abe climbed into the cockpit. A newspaper man, a decent guy, who flew a little himself, stepped close to Pen.

‘You want to know how we’re gonna be covering this tomorrow?’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you. T
HE
G
LORY
B
OYS
F
LY
A
GAIN
. That’ll be our headline. We’ve got that guy Thornton taking the rap for the whole Powell Lambert thing. We’ve got your Captain Rockwell doing this. It’s kind of like the war again, ain’t it? Only better. The war, really, what was that? The further it slides back into the past, the more damned I am if I can remember what it was all about anyway. But this, this stuff is real. Cleaning up America. Crossing an ocean. Now that I can understand. T
HE
G
LORY
B
OYS FLY AGAIN
. Yep, that feels like a story all right.’

‘The Glory Boys fly again.’ Pen said the phrase over to herself in her head as Abe was done with his checks. The big propeller blade flashed into action. Abe looked back at the crowd, sought out Pen, raised a thumb and smiled. Had he heard the newspaper man speak? She didn’t know why, but she felt he had the same phrase in his head too. Maybe he was even thinking of Will Thornton, the booze-dealer who’d come good.

The two fliers, Abe and Pen, took a long look at each other.

He saw in her the woman he loved: tall, boyish, quiet, inward, but also alive, quick to smile, young.

And she saw him: the man she loved. Middling height. Not big-built. Poised. A sense of athleticism held a long way in reserve. Eyes of astonishing blueness. His face lined but still somehow young. Or perhaps not young exactly, but alert, watchful. And smiling. That was how she held him in her heart.

Smiling.

HISTORICAL NOTE

One of the pilots to have survived the First World War told of a friend who, returning to his aerodrome one day, had emerged from a cloud upside down and heading fast towards the steeple of the local village church. Only lightning-fast reactions saved the day on that occasion. (The pilot concerned subsequently lost his life due to enemy action.) But the strange part of the tale was this. The pilot concerned reported that all the time he’d been stuck inside the cloud, he had been absolutely convinced that he was flying straight and level and true. His first reaction on finding himself zooming upside down towards a steeple wasn’t fear, but amazement.

With jet planes, of course, and modern instruments, nothing like this could possibly happen now. But any reader who doubts that a sober human being could lose orientation so completely can easily try the following simple experiment. All you need to do is buy yourself an hour’s instruction in a microlight aircraft and ask your instructor to head for the nearest cloud. Once you get there, take the controls yourself. (Don’t worry. The plane will have dual controls and the instructor will watch you like a hawk. I’m certainly riot suggesting that you go out there and kill yourself.) Then do it. Fly straight and level in zero visibility. You won’t be able to. You’ll think you are doing it, but then your instructor will point out that your wings are beginning to tilt, you’re beginning to turn, your nose is starting to dip. At this point, you’ll take your hands gratefully off the control stick, and your instructor will guide you out of the cloud. (Even top-notch pilots don’t like to hang around in nil visibility.) But there it is. Your lesson. Of course, all that happened is that you
started
to tilt, you
started
to nose downwards. But that’s how it always starts: gradually. Bit by bit, the plane’s flight will diverge wildly from normal. And all the time, your sense of your aircraft’s attitude will get further and further away from reality.