scene. Willard’s four sisters flirted with men like these. They petted with men like these. One day they’d marry men like these.
But not Hughes.
Hughes was no shorter than Ronson and not much lighter. But where you could imagine all the other men playing tennis or a game of ball or messing around in boats or on the beach, Hughes was different. He stood out. His hands were fidgety and nervous. His spectacles were thick and bookish. His clothes were decent enough, but the cut wasn’t quite right, the fashions weren’t quite of the moment, the poor fellow’s tie wasn’t even tied right.
‘Hughes. Charlie Hughes. Hello. Nice to have you join us. Really.’
He nodded once too often, shook Willard’s hand once more than he should have done.
Willard, whose instinct for these things was immaculate, instantly placed Hughes at the bottom of the pack. The pack-leader he guessed was probably Larry Ronson, for his intelligence and likeability, though Willard couldn’t see Leo McVeigh being bossed around by any of them. That left Iggy Claverty, court jester to Ronson’s prince. Willard’s colossal debt and his bootblack-style income was a disaster whichever way he looked at it. But at least his new work colleagues were ones he was sure he’d get on with. His nerves began to recede.
‘And allow me to introduce you to the sun of our little solar system, the flower of our garden, the lovely Miss Annabelle Hooper.’
Larry Ronson took Willard over to the secretary’s circular desk. Miss Hooper, blushing, stood up to shake Willard’s hand. She was mid-twenties, brunette, light blue eyes, freckled, petite. She was pretty, but unspectacular, the sort of girl you’d be happy to kiss, but not the sort you’d want on your arm anywhere important.
‘Just Annie, for heaven’s sake. Don’t listen to Larry.’
‘What, never?’ said Willard. ‘You’re very stern.’
‘Oh no!’
‘Oh yes!’ said Ronson. ‘Powell barketh, but Miss Hooper biteth. And if she says she don’t, then she speaketh not the truth. See this?’ He held up a brown manila folder, perhaps half an inch thick. ‘This may look like office stationery. It may feel, smell and – for all I know – taste like office stationery. But all that’s a snare and a deception. These files will consume your life. They’re the curse of Powell Lambert. Mr Claverty, if you please…’
Ronson handed the file to Iggy Claverty, who took it with an air of exaggerated ceremony. Bringing the file over to Willard, he held it out with both hands, as though the file were a precious gift being handed to a king. He bowed his head.
‘May the torture commence.’
Abe sat at the back of a café on the waterfront. On the drink-slopped table in front of him, he had a glass of brown rum and a plate of rice and fish. A cheap mystery novel lay half-read by his elbow. Outside the café, ocean and sunlight combined to scrub the air so clean it sparkled.
Abe was a mail pilot now. For the Havana end of his business, he had rented a field a little way inland from the Puerto del Ingles. In Miami, he’d persuaded the city authorities to release land for their very own international airport. The Miami field was hardly less basic than the Havana one: comprising an oblong of sandy grass, three hundred yards at its longest, and a tin-roofed, steel-framed hangar. Each day for four weeks now, Abe took off from Miami not long after dawn with a bag of US mail for Havana. He washed off, walked down to the Puerto del Ingles, and took an early lunch, before returning to his airplane in the hope that the Cuban postal authorities wouldn’t be more than a couple of hours late in bringing the US-bound mail. When it finally arrived, Abe flew it to Miami, job done.
Abe sipped his rum and went back to his novel. In the corner of the bar, a bunch of bootleggers from Marion were on their way to getting drunk. And they were bootleggers, of course. Here, in free and easy Cuba, there was no need to disguise the fact. True, the wooden crates they loaded into their boats were marked ‘Maís de Aranjuez’ or ‘Jamón Serrano de Cuba’. But the markings meant nothing. Often enough the crates weren’t even lidded properly. The bottles of Johnny Walker or Gordon’s Gin shone out as plain as day.
Behind the bar, a home-made radio set tried its hardest to pick up a station from Miami. Mostly the set couldn’t get a signal, just the whistle and crackle of empty space. Abe read. The bootleggers drank. The radio whistled.
After an hour or so, one of the bootleggers lurched up from his seat and came swaying past Abe’s table. The bootlegger’s bleary eyes focused on Abe’s grey mailbag, and the leather helmet and goggles looped around the handles. The man stopped, stared – then inspiration struck.
‘Hey Birdman!’ he said, flapping his arms. ‘Birdman, Birdman.’
He stopped and grinned again, as though expecting Abe to declare that was the first time he’d heard that joke in all his ten years of aviation. Abe did and said nothing. The bootlegger revved his brain to full throttle and came up with something else every bit as funny.
‘Hey, Birdie. I wanna send a postcard, you gotta stamp?’
The man leered at his friends for applause, and got it. Abe said nothing, did nothing. The man cast around in the cavernous emptiness of his skull for anything else funny, but came away with nothing. He lingered a second or two, then headed off to get drinks.
That was that.
But then, just three days later, Abe was back in the same bar with the same bunch. The radio had, for once, found a jazz tune and was holding to it with a kind of feeble determination. This time another one of the bootleggers approached. Not drunk this time, and not offensive.
‘Hey, pal, sorry about the other day. That birdman stuff. Guess that ain’t funny, huh?’
‘Not too funny, nope.’
‘You ain’t sore?’
‘No.’
The bootlegger looked down at Abe’s mailsack. It was a small bag. Mostly Abe carried just a few pounds of mail each way. At a commercial rate of a few nickels a pound, he’d have been a million miles from profit. Flying as he was for free, he was a million and one miles short.
‘You carry mail? That’s all?’
‘Cargo, passengers, anything that pays.’
‘You do OK at that?’
Abe shrugged.
‘Guess you must.’
Abe shrugged again. A shrug wasn’t a statement, so it couldn’t be a lie. But the fact was that Abe hadn’t had a single customer since starting business.
‘You’re sure you ain’t sore? You didn’t answer us today.’
‘Answer you?’
‘We signalled from the boat. We saw you coming in. Fired off a handgun. Da-da-da-da-da-dum. That didn’t do nothing, so we shot off the rifle. Boom, boom.’
‘I sit six feet from a ninety-horse engine in an eighty-mile-an-hour wind.’
‘You didn’t hear nothing?’
‘Use a mirror. You want to signal, you need to flash.’
‘Huh, OK.’ The bootlegger shifted his weight from leg to leg. ‘Sorry about the other day, OK?’
Abe shrugged.
‘Listen, buddy, if you’re a man for liquor, just let us know, OK? We can let you have some cheap. Wholesale, you know.’
‘I’m OK. Thanks.’
‘Right.’ Chatting with Abe wasn’t always easy, not if you wanted your conversational balls returned over the net. The bootlegger shifted his weight again. ‘A mirror, huh?’