The Sons of Adam (56 page)

The more he thought about it, the stronger the old anger burned. Tom would not –
would not
– permit himself to be outdone. The resolution was like a flame in his heart, strong, blue, focused, intensely hot. It was a flame that would find its target or incinerate its owner. Maybe both.

When he met up with Rebecca later that night, she was shocked to see him.

‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ she said.

And she was right. He had.

There’s ‘Gull ’em & Skinner’
And ‘Gammon & Sinner’
‘R. Askal & Oily & Son’
With ‘Sponge ’em & Fleece ’em’
And ‘Strip ’em & Grease ’em’
And ‘Take ’em in Brothers & Run’.

from ‘Famous Oil Firms’
by E. Pluribus Oilum

June 1932. The Great Crash has ushered in the Great Depression. Hemlines are lower. Prices are weak. Dictators are powerful, and democrats fearful.

In the meantime, the oil business is proving tough. That’s nothing new. It always has been. Always will be. That’s why it’s fun.

‘Hello, George? What d’you have for me today?’

‘Morning, laddie … hey, hey, my Lord, I’m not as young as I was.’ George Reynolds walked in and sank gratefully into one of Alan’s chairs. At sixty-three, he was almost ready to quit the deserts and mountains and settle back full time in England. The shares he’d owned in Alanto Oil had turned him into a rich man. He cared little enough for money, but Alan was pleased to see him comfortably off.

‘Lord, is there such a thing as a cup of tea in this wretched country?’ he asked.

Alan grinned and ordered tea for them both from his desk intercom. ‘It’ll be in cup and saucer, though,’ he apologised, ‘No samovars. No hubble-bubble. No iced sherbets.’

‘Uncivilised brute. Any minute now, you’ll be telling me you haven’t slaughtered a sheep in my honour.’

Alan’s smile continued, but the warmth of Reynolds’ entry made him think of his dinner last night. He and Lottie had kept a long-standing engagement with Guy and Dorothy. The conversation had been awkward and cold. Guy had drunk too much and, for most of the evening, Lottie and Alan had been forced to talk to each other, as though their hosts had been absent. When finally the last awful mouthful had been forced down, and Alan and Lottie were in a position to leave, Guy accompanied his brother to the door.

‘I suppose I ought to tell you, Dorothy is leaving me. We’ll be getting a divorce, then she’ll go back to America. Most bloody stupid thing. Marrying her, I mean. Sorry about this evening. You must have hated it. I did.’

In the car on the way home, Alan and Lottie had discussed, in quiet voices, whether a bad marriage was better than no marriage at all. Now, in Reynolds’ presence, Alan realised the married state wasn’t the important thing: the person was. A good man like Reynolds would find his peace in any circumstances. A flawed one like Guy … well, peace seemed to be beyond him in any situation.

‘Now look, said Reynolds, extracting a lengthy telegram from his pocket. ‘Good news, I think. Mussolini’s torn up his oil contract with Shell, and wants to negotiate a new one with an “entity working for the consolidation of the fascistic reconstruction of the Italian nationhood”, whatever on earth that means. Apparently, it means Mussolini was getting fed up being pushed around by Shell and he wants to deal with someone small enough to
be
pushed around.’

Alan stopped. For a moment it seemed like the world stopped too. There was a second or two of total silence.

‘The Italian government has cancelled its deal with Shell?’ He spoke like a man in a trance.

‘Yes.’

‘They’re looking for a new supplier?’

‘Yes.’

‘They’re asking us?’

‘Among others. Yes.’

Alan breathed; not because he quite dared to, but because he’d been holding his breath since Reynolds had mentioned the telegram. The breath came out jagged, as though his lungs were still suffering from the war.

He was intensely excited, and little wonder. Alanto Oil produced crude oil on a massive scale, mostly from Persia, but now increasingly from Iraq as well. It refined as much of its crude as it was able to, but even so, its refineries were hard-pressed to cope. But refining wasn’t the weak spot. Marketing was. Anglo-Persian, Shell, Standard – all had massive chains of petrol stations stretching right across the globe. Alanto Oil struggled to shift its oil and ended up selling at a discount. A huge contract with the Italians would be a vast breakthrough in the company’s short history.

‘Petrol?’ he asked.

‘Yes, but not only.’

‘What else?’

‘Everything. For instance, “petroleum fractions of high-octane composition as might be suitable for flight of aircraft not of passenger denomination”,’ Reynolds quoted from the telegram once again before handing it over to his boss. ‘I assume that means they want us to fuel their filthy warplanes.’

‘We’ll tell him to get his aircraft fuel from elsewhere. He’s welcome to petrol, but I’m not going to help him fly his bombers.’

But Alan’s hands were shaking with eagerness as he reached for the telegram. He read and reread it with mounting excitement, then looked up. Fire glinted in his pale eyes. Quite unconsciously, his hand had formed itself into a fist, crumpling the telegram into a ball. He beat his hand softly against the table.

‘We have to win this deal, George,’ he said.

Tom stood in thick leather boots and a pair of goggles. They were outside beneath the sweet gums, because the refinery’s tiny office was sweltering and oppressive. A greasy breeze moved between the trees.

‘See now?’ said the young chemist. ‘This here’s being sold as gasoline. It shouldn’t ignite, not until we’ve got the temperature up another forty, fifty degrees.’

There was a dishful of fuel brewing over a burner, with an industrial steel thermometer recording the temperature. In the background, the pipes and cooling towers of the rinky-dink little refinery reached upwards towards an unblemished sky.

‘You might want to stand back there, Mr Calloway. I wouldn’t want –’

Too late.

The dish of fuel caught alight, and flames and smoke leaped upwards. The young chemist had known what was coming but, even so, he was startled. He jumped back, caught his foot on a table leg, and fell over, bringing the table and fuel dish after him. The blazing gasoline spilled over his leg and puddled right over the dirt and pine needles all around. The flames began to scorch upwards. There was shouting and screaming, though in the confusion you could hardly tell who was yelling, let alone what they were saying. A couple of acne-scarred lab assistants began swatting feebly at the flaming leg.

Tom was faster, and not just faster, he was better.

He ripped off his jacket and leaped towards the screaming chemist. One of the pimply youths was in the way and Tom threw him aside, the way a rodeo horse tosses a novice. Tom wrapped the leg in his coat and hugged it tight, until the flames were smothered. The chemist, ashamed of his clumsiness in front of his boss, began to pull his leg away, muttering thanks.

Tom ignored the thanks and the tugging leg. Gasoline flames have a nasty habit of leaping back into life as soon as oxygen returns. Tom carried the chemist to a butt of water and dunked him in. The man tried to climb out, but Tom held him back. ‘You stay there till we can get a doctor here. Got that?’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Sorry, sir.’

‘Can you get your pants off?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then get your pants off.’

The man complied. His leg was burnt, but nothing too bad. He’d be fine.

Tom turned away to find himself watched by the company’s Chief Operating Officer, who was doubled up with laughter.

‘Testing out fuel quality, huh? We should use that in the ads, maybe. “Bites the pants, but spares the man.” What d’you reckon?’

Tom spat. ‘What you got for me, Lyman?’

Lyman Bard, the Chief Operating Officer, waved a telegram. ‘I got good news, pal – least it’s good news if I got this damn thing figured out straight.’

Keen to honour the memory of his friend from prison camp, Tom had named his company Norgaard Petroleum. It was quite an honour.

Norgaard Petroleum had grown fast and grown big.

There are big strikes and little strikes, and Tom’s was about to prove one of the richest in history. The Black Giant oilfield – there was no other name for it – turned out to stretch from Upshur County in the north to the north-east tip of Cherokee County in the south. The field was forty-five miles long and between five to twelve miles wide: more than one hundred and forty thousand acres of liquid gold. The twenty-one thousand acres that Tom had leases on didn’t all lie on the field, of course. Much of his land lay too far east, and no matter how many wells were drilled there, every single one came up dusters. But an even larger chunk of his land proved to be as sweet and rich as a Rockefeller daydream – fifteen thousand acres stretching all the way to Overton and beyond, with oil, beautiful oil, beneath every inch.

His dream had come true.

More than true. Better than true. Truer than true.

But Tom was older than he had been on Signal Hill. Older and smarter. He remembered Mitch Norgaard in prison telling him, ‘It ain’t enough to find oil, Tom, it’s turning it into dollars that counts.’

Tom had been dealt a hand full of aces. But he still had to play them and a dumb move could cost him the game.

First things first. He’d hired a bunch of lawyers to settle the multitude of claims against Harrelson. He’d settled them as fast as he could, fast and generously. When the dust had cleared, he had undisputed title to all fifteen thousand acres of oil-producing territory, with debts (including the million he owed to Harrelson) amounting to around three million.

Three million in debt and not a penny in his pocket.

Tom didn’t care.

He raised money, somehow, anyhow. It was simple enough. He had fifteen thousand acres of the richest land in the world and banks were dying to lend. With Rebecca handling the finance, Tom stood at the centre of the whirlwind. He planted rigs on his land like he was sowing corn. Within a matter of months his daily production was better than fifty thousand barrels a day. Fifty thousand barrels and income to match.

Meantime, all around, the world was going crazy. What had been tiny little farming villages turned into honky-tonk boom towns on a scale that made even Signal Hill look provincial. Farmers turned into hustlers, cowpokes into wildcatters. Fields of corn were left to rot, as no one could spare the time to harvest them.

But Norgaard’s warning rang in Tom’s ears – Norgaard’s warning and Tom’s own experience.

One day, with the oil price still strong and the oil rage still rising, Tom called a halt.

‘A halt?’ asked Rebecca, surprised. ‘We have money for another nine rigs. More, as soon as I can get our next loan organised.’

Tom bent and kissed her on the top of her beautiful head. ‘A halt. No more rigs. We ought to start selling.’

‘Selling?’ Rebecca furrowed her eyebrows. ‘You are joking, I suppose?’

He smiled down at her. She had an odd way occasionally of sounding like an immigrant newly arrived from the boat. Partly it was her accent, which hadn’t changed through all the time Tom had known her. Partly it was her English, which had remained oddly formal, even old-fashioned at times.