The Sons of Adam (58 page)

‘Yah!’ Bard growled his hatred of the Oklahoma dirt-track that was trying to pass itself off as road. The Wichita Mountains loomed black and humped in the middle distance. A thin wind rattled the dry grass. ‘Who the hell would drill a place like this?’

They drove on in silence, interrupted only by the violence of the car’s motion and a stream of muttered swearwords from Bard. Tom sat and thought about Rebecca. He’d become a real homebody now. He liked visiting his own oil facilities, but apart from that, he just liked being at home. At home with her. Who’d have guessed that he’d have turned out like that? The wanderer had come home. The thought made him grin.

Eventually the track levelled off and the road surface improved.

‘All to see a lousy ginzo!’ said Bard.

‘You’re sure he speaks Italian?’

‘No, pal. Name like Marinelli, he speaks Swedish and eats … I don’t know, whatever the hell they eat in Sweden. Reindeer.’

‘And he’s reliable, right?’

‘I told you. He’s not your regular type of ginzo. Neatest guy for reaming a well I ever saw.’

‘Lyman, for Chrissake! I don’t want him to ream wells for me, I want to know he’s not going to play me for a sucker.’

They came to a fork in the road, neither direction signed. Bard hit the brakes angrily and grabbed the map on the rear seat.

‘He’s straight. I already told you.’

‘OK. It’s important.’

Bard spat out of the car door, then reached for a packet of cigarettes. His head, face and shoulders were covered in a fine grey dust. Where he’d lifted the packet of cigarettes, there was a dark mark left on the dashboard.

‘OK, pal. I’ll tell you how come I know he’s straight. In return, maybe you could tell me why all of a sudden you want a ginzo.’ He lit up and threw the match out of the open window into the dirt. ‘Back in ’twenty-five, we was working a new-fangled type of electric well out here in Oklahoma. No boiler. No steam. Just electrics. We hated it. I mean the thing was unlucky. It looked wrong, sounded wrong. The well belonged to some dumb-as-shit New York consortium who probably picked the thing out of a book. Three thousand feet down, we get an escape of gas. We need to get the blowout preventer in, and fast. We’re kinda jumpy, but it’s going OK. Then the motor surges. It’s hot. There are sparks. Big blue sparks crackling through the air. We stare at them like dummies. Then – boom! – worst possible time, we have a full-scale blowout. The works. Oil, mud, water, gas. I seen wells take before, but this was a scorcher.’ He spat. ‘Shoulda stuck with steam. Slam-bam-an’-go-to-hell.’

‘Hmm.’ Tom grunted and reached for one of Bard’s cigarettes. ‘But Marinelli survived, right? I don’t have any use for a heap of Italian-speaking charcoal.’

‘Yeah, he’s OK. The guy was on fire, I run back in, haul him out. Don’t really know why, only I did. And that’s how I know he’s straight. He owes me. Them Catholic boys remember that kinda stuff.’

‘Excellent.’ Tom’s eyes gleamed with something dark. ‘You saved his life and he knows it.’

‘Yeah.’

Bard continued to wrestle angrily with his map, but Tom tapped him on the arm and pointed. Further down the valley, sticking up above the scraggy little oaks, there poked the unmistakable shape of a wooden-built oil derrick.

‘That must be Marinelli, over there.’

‘You still haven’t told me why you want a ginzo,’ said Bard, as he put the De Soto into gear and began to move off.

‘I’ve got a job for him.’

‘What kind of a job?’

But Tom just shook his head. He wouldn’t say any more. Not yet.

But one thing he knew was this: there weren’t many firms capable of meeting the requirements for the Italian contract. Norgaard was one of the leading contenders. Another one was Alanto Oil. Tom and Alan head-to-head. Tom and Alan in a battle for supremacy.

Tom grinned again, but not warmly this time. Savagely. Even brutally. If this was a game, he was playing to win.

Ellis Island.

Maybe now they’ve cleaned it up. Maybe now they’ve gone out into the North Atlantic and picked up an ocean gale and sent it screaming down the halls and walls and passages of the old immigration buildings until the place came to shine like it had been scrubbed with sea air and salt, and all the old smells had been rubbed out of it for ever.

Maybe.

Only more likely not. More likely the place still carries its smell of hope and anxiety; poverty and ambition; old oppressions cast aside; the stink of pork sausage, hard biscuit and dark European tobacco.

Alan walked stiffly along the corridors, feeling out of place and awkward. He was still conscious of his row with Lottie and he almost felt obliged to find Tom in order to prove her wrong. Eventually, he got to the right door: one marked ‘James F. Galston, Immigration Records Officer’. Alan put his hand to the door and knocked.

Galston was a foxy little man with quick eyes and a nervous mouth.

‘Yeah, sure, come in. Close the door, would ya mind? No, don’t worry. On second thoughts, leave it … No, better shut, I guess. Sure, closed. That’s it. Right. Great.’

Galston’s office was little better than a cubicle with cardboard walls and a thin window set into an iron frame. The frame had corroded badly in the sea air and each time there was a puff of wind outside, the glass rattled.

‘You want coffee? I can get Miss Jennings down the hall to fix you some co –’

‘No, thank you, I’m quite all right.’

‘Hey, sit. Sorry. I should have said. Sit! I didn’t mean for ya to stand.’

Alan took the cheap little folding chair on his side of Galston’s desk and moved some papers from it so he could sit. The chair was filmed over with the damp stickiness of the ocean. Alan sat. Something about Galston’s staccato brittleness actually made him calmer, less hurried, more businesslike.

‘Perhaps I should say why I came,’ he said smoothly. ‘As you know, I was given your name by a detective named –’

‘Oswald, right. Pete Oswald. Sure. Pinkerton’s. Right. Do a lot for them. When I can. Help ’em out. Good guys.’

‘Yes. I spoke with Peter Oswald. I’m trying to trace a man whose name in England was Tom Creeley. I believe he arrived here in Ellis Island some time late in nineteen eighteen or, more likely, at some point during nineteen nineteen. Pinkerton’s hasn’t been able to find him under his real name and we suspect he must have changed his name, most likely upon entry to this country. Now what I wondered was –’

‘Yeah, right, got you, regular type o’ thing. Search. British male, right? Entry nineteen eighteen, maybe nineteen nineteen. Say ’twenty as well. Don’t want to pin these things down too tight. Not unless you know. Right. For certain, I mean. You got a dob?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘A dob?’

‘I don’t –’

‘Hey, sorry, shoulda said. Dob. Date of birth. Technical term. Use it a lot round here. Dob. You got one?’

‘Date of birth?’ Alan half-laughed. Date of birth was easy. It always had been. The 23 August 1893. It was his own date of birth; his and Tom’s; the terrible twins of Whitcombe House. Alan gave Galston the date, in the same even tone he’d used so far.

‘Right, OK, good. We got a dob. British male. Assumed name. Entry date known, only approximate, but we got something. It’s a heck of a search, yeah, a heck of a search. Did Oswald mention anything about … ? I mean, like … It’s a big one.’

Galston’s nervousness had gone into overdrive. He had found a broken matchstick in the litter on his table and was sawing at something brown between his front teeth, whilst fidgeting nervously with his trouser leg with his free hand. He looked like a panicked starling. For a second or two, Alan stared at him, amazed. Maybe taking bribes was a cultural thing, something they knew how to manage better in Persia than here in America. Alan covered his smile with his hand, then said, ‘I understand this is beyond the call of duty. Of course, I’d want to reward you well for your effort.’

‘Yeah, yeah, reward. Good way of putting it. That’s very straight of you.’

‘How much do you feel would be appropriate in this case?’

Galston’s heart rate rose slightly until it entered the low nine hundreds. He sawed so hard with the matchstick that a bit of it broke off inside his gum, but his right hand was too busy with his trouser leg to do anything to get the splinter out. There was sweat on his forehead, though the room was barely even warm.

And then Alan’s gaze travelled up and he saw it. Beyond Galston’s agitated shoulder. Through the thin window in its rattly frame. Beyond the broad swathe of water where the chilly Hudson joined a cold Atlantic. The Statue of Liberty, torch raised, looking out to Europe, with her promise of a new future, new hope.

Suddenly, Alan knew Tom had seen this sight. He didn’t know what had driven Tom away from Europe. He didn’t know why Tom had changed his name, changed his country, hidden from the truest friend he’d ever had or ever would have again. Alan simply knew that Tom had been through this port, that he’d seen that sight, that he’d taken that promise of liberty to his heart.

‘Perhaps five hundred dollars would be sufficient,’ he said in a distant voice, his attention still focused on the view beyond the window.

‘Five hundred bucks? Five
hundred
… ?
Five
Cs … ? You wanna … ?’

Alan smiled. In Galston-ese that was a positive yes – and no wonder, since Alan had probably overpaid five times over.

But he didn’t care. He didn’t even look at Galston, so captivated was he by the sight of that noble statue. It was in that moment that he knew for the first time, as a matter of absolute certainty, that Tom was alive and that he, Alan, was going to find him.

Bard was woken up by a kick on the sole of his boots. He blinked himself awake to find Tom and Marinelli, already best buddies, laughing down at him.

‘Hey, guys!’ he said, swatting ants away from his trouser leg with his hat. ‘You get anything fixed up?’

Marinelli grinned. His face was badly scarred. Any oilman would instantly recognise a man who’d been caught by a bad oil blaze. His white teeth looked oddly out of place in his red and black complexion. ‘No, no. Not
any
-thing, we get
every
-thing fixed up.’

Tom was over by the De Soto beating grey Oklahoma dust from the rear seat. ‘We better get going, Lyman. We gotta go by Gianfranco’s place.’

‘You’re coming back with us?’ said Lyman, in surprise. Even by Tom’s standards, it was fast work getting a man to leave his job, home and family all at the drop of a hat.

‘No, no, not with you. Not all the way. Only to the
stazione
.’

‘The stat-see-oh-nee?’ said Lyman, copying Marinelli’s pronunciation. ‘The railroad? Either of you guys gonna tell me what’s going on?’

Marinelli laughed again and looked across at Tom, who nodded.

‘I am going on holiday,’ he said. ‘To Roma. I stay in a nice hotel. I throw some nice parties. I make some friends.’

Bard was totally confused now. He looked at Tom, a little angry at the way his boss was playing with him. ‘You wanted a ginzo to send on holiday?’

Tom laughed. ‘In Italy, Lyman, a good friend is a talkative friend. Right, Gianfranco?’

And it was in that moment, for the first time, that Bard understood what his boss was doing. His boss was a genius. A double-crossing bastard maybe, but a genius for sure.

With a man like that bidding for the Italian contract, they almost literally couldn’t lose.

‘I’m sure Mrs Montague said to meet you in the West Wing, sir,’ said the matron. ‘Maybe she meant in amputations.’

The matron scurried around, looking for Lottie. Alan followed.

Lottie’s hospital was now fully operational. The once-derelict factory buildings now hummed with busyness. The place smelled of clean sheets and medical alcohol and fresh air blowing in from the Thames outside.

As Alan chased after the matron, he saw ward after ward. Most of them were set aside for veterans of the war: the pale-faced boys that had fed the British Army’s insatiable need for troops. There were men here who’d had limbs amputated in the war now being fitted for artificial limbs. There were others being treated for damage to eyes, ears, lungs, or throats. There were shell-shock survivors whose suffering was being taken seriously, in some cases for the first time. The British Army had cared for these men to the best of its ability a dozen years back, but the need for care was never-ending and the army’s medical budget wasn’t.

‘Perhaps it must have been the East Wing after all,’ said the matron.

Alan followed slowly. She was wrong again. Lottie wasn’t in the East Wing, or the West Wing, or any of the wards in between. When they finally tracked her down, she was in a lung damage ward tucked away to the north.

‘There you are!’ said the matron.

Something about her tone was unconvincing. Alan shot her a glance, in time to catch a look passing between the two women. Alan understood it. The game of hide-and-seek had been prearranged. It was Lottie’s way of making sure that Alan – finally – saw her hospital properly for the first time.