“That silly!” she said. “That boy don’t know a thing.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Why’s it all square?”
“It’s called Cubism, darling. An early modernist movement, which broke down the convention of the narrative and the objective. It communicates the power of ideas over precise information. One can feel its power. Actually when Ben says ‘Newark,’ in his way he’s not far wrong. Braque called it Houses at L’Estaque. But it’s not about houses. It’s really about the power of the universe and how its deepest secrets are hidden from us.”
She looked at him all goo-goo-eyed.
“Why, honey, I never knew you were so smart! You sound like a regular Albert Einstein.”
“It’s not quite e equals mc squared, but in its way it’s an equally radical supposition, eh?”
He stood there, feeling the pride he drew from the picture. Knowing its secrets made him feel ineffably superior. None of the square Johns from the Hot Springs business community who frequented his soirees had an iota’s worth of knowledge about this thing. At $75,000 it had been cheap for that thrill alone.
“Houses at L’Estaque,” she repeated. “Ain’t that a toot!”
43
It was too hot for gardening—it was darned near too hot for anything!—but Junie wasn’t the sort to be stopped by a little heat. So out she went, the baby huge inside her and kicking, her feelings a little woozy, but nevertheless determined.
Arkansas was not rose country. You couldn’t get a good rose, at least not here, on this flat plain with its half-buried tubes of homes and no clouds in the sky and the sun hammering down, somehow bleeding the day of color. She hadn’t even tried roses. She knew roses would fail in so much direct sunlight.
So she’d planted less aristocratic flowers in the little bed outside her hut on 5th Street in the Camp Chaffee vets village, a mix of hydrangeas, daisies, lilacs and lilies. Now some weeds had come into the garden and it was time to expunge them.
Of course she had no tools, and the dried earth was too hard to attack with a spoon, and so she rooted around and found a ghoulish Jap bayonet that Earl had brought home from the war. It had a long, black blade, a truly horrifying thing, but she put it out of her mind that it had once been used to kill men, and insisted to herself that it was only a tool. With its smooth sharpness, she could penetrate into the soil deeply, twist vigorously and uproot the ugly scruff weeds that had seemed to come up almost overnight.
It wasn’t a big job and wouldn’t have been beyond her in any circumstances except these, where the heat just pummeled her. But she worked onward, through her discomfort, through her sweat, and in an hour had culled most of them. But her back ached. And her feelings of wooziness suddenly increased.
So she sat back for just a second, wiped her brow, and gathered strength for the last few weeds.
Possibly a mistake. As soon as she did, she looked up. Life was livable as long as you simply concentrated on what was just ahead of you, and let your faith and your love steer you, and did your duty. That she knew.
But, looking up, she confronted a bigger picture: the rows and rows of Quonsets gleaming dully in the sun, lit up now and then with a wife’s attempt to brighten them (as she had) with flowers. The attempts were heroic and doomed. The huts were still government housing, with laundry on lines that ran between them, hardscrabble, almost grassless dirt that lay in the lots, dusty gravel streets.
Would they ever get out?
What about the boom? Would it ever reach them and take them somewhere? But not if Earl was dead in some horrid battle for nothing against gangsters.
Don’t think that, she warned herself. She had a deep belief in God, country and her husband, and would never allow herself any willing subversion. But later, more and more, evil thoughts had been creeping into her brain.
Is this it? Is this what I get? What about all the jobs that were supposed to open up after the war, the explosion in industry and finance, construction and communication? Shouldn’t it somehow be for the men who’d fought the hardest, like her Earl? Instead, is he going to throw his life away for nothing?
The man who was her husband was still a considerable mystery to her. He didn’t like to talk about the war or his past, but they deviled him savagely. He was a good man, an honest man, but he had a reservoir of melancholy deep inside him that would not come out. When he gets on his feet, she thought, it will be all better. But he was on his feet now, and what he loved best had nothing to do with her, but only with other men, some kind of mission, something that took him so far away not just in emotion but in distance. It would involve guns and killing. He loved her, she knew. She didn’t doubt it, not a bit of it. But the question remained: what good was that kind of love, because it wasn’t the love of somebody there, somebody to be depended on. It was love as an idea, not a messy reality, love from afar. He was still at war, in certain ways.
The baby kicked.
You stop it, you little thing, she ordered.
He kicked harder, and there came a sudden cramp so intense her limbs buckled and down she went, curling up.
Oh, Lord? Was it time?
But her water hadn’t broken, so no, it wasn’t time, it was just one of those rogue pains that sometimes happen.
She wasn’t sure what happened next. It all went dark. She fell into pain, then numbness. Then she heard a voice and thought it might be Earl’s.
“Earl, honey?”
“No, Junie, it’s me, Mary, from next door. Honey lamb, you fainted.”
Mary Blanton was kneeling beside her, fanning her with a copy of Redbook.
“Oh, my goodness,” said Junie.
“I don’t know anything about being pregnant, Junie, but I can’t think weeding in ninety-five-degree weather is recommended.”
Junie shook the confusion out of her eyes. Now she felt really icky.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said.
“Come on, honey, let me get you inside and into some shade. You can’t lie out here and roast.”
With Mary’s help, Junie hobbled inside, where she lay down on her bed.
In the little kitchenette, Mary turned on all the fans, then threw ice into a glass and appeared with a large iced tea.
“Here you go, you sip on that till you get your strength back.”
Junie sipped the tea and its coolness hit her solidly.
“Are you okay?” Mary asked.
“Yes, I’m fine now. Thank you so much, Mary.”
Mary was the bluntest woman Junie had ever met, and she’d worked in war factories for years while her husband, Phil, was in the Navy. Now he was working in a radio shop by day and going to electronics school at night on the GI Bill.
“Well, I don’t know about any husband like yours who’d leave a girl all alone as much as you are. A girl as pretty as you and as pregnant as you ought to be getting special attention, not all by herself in a tin hut, pining away.”
“Earl’s got a job he has to do. He always does his job. That’s the kind of a man he is.”
“If you say so, Junie. I never heard of such a thing. It’s not how we’d do it up North.”
Mary just didn’t understand, not being from around here.
“I know he was a hero, but that only goes so far. A man ought to be home when his young wife is going to have a baby.”
Junie nodded. Then she started to cry.
Mary held her, muttering, “There, there, sweetie, you just cry it all out, don’t you worry.”
Finally Junie looked up.
“I am so scared,” she said.
“About your Earl?”
“Yes. But also about the baby. I can feel it. There’s something wrong. I could lose them both.”
44
Earl and D.A. were not demonstrative men. But the confidence they now felt, armed with the Reverend Jubilee Lincoln’s signed affidavit and his considerable courage, came through anyway, in the way they walked, in the way they talked, in the
way they were. The men realized that something had happened, some breakthrough had been made, and the game was very nearly over, victory in sight. That filled everyone with hope and joy, and even the loss of the heavy automatic weapons and the bulletproof vests and six men seemed not to faze anyone; a general air of lightness and frivolity ensued as they broke down the camp at the Red River Army Depot, loaded up and headed out for the new quarters on the Pettyview chicken ranch.
It helped that the phrase “chicken ranch” was a well-known synonym for whorehouse.
“Hey, we’re going to a chicken ranch. Whoo-eee!”
“Bear, would your mama ’low such a thing?”
“Hell, bubba, I was a champeen chicken rassler afore you’se even a glint in your daddy’s eye!”
“Boy, the best part of you ran down your mama’s leg. Tell you what, you need any help, y’all come to me and I’ll show you the ropes.”
“Yeah, you guys all talk big, lemme tell you when you get a dose your old dicks gonna swell up like a tire on a hot day. Shoot, saw a feller in Memphis so purple and swoll-up he couldn’t get his zipper zipped. Had to walk around with it hanging out. But it was so purple, nobody thought it was a dick; they thought it was some kind of tube or something.”
The joshing continued, and someone said to Earl, who was supervising benevolently, “Say, Mr. Earl, we are running low on .45 hardball.”
Earl examined the ammunition cache. There was but one case of the .45 hardball left, that is, 1,000 rounds.
“Shit,” said Earl. “Well, I doubt we’ll need it anyhow.”
“Yes sir.”
“Lookie here,” said Earl, figuring out a scrounger’s angle. “I see we got plenty ball tracer we used in the training.”
It was true. Four cases of the Cartridge Caliber .45 Tracer M26 remained.
“Look, load up two cases of the tracer in my trunk. Maybe I can work a trade with another agency or something, and lay off the tracer in exchange for some more hardball. Who knows? If we have to, we can always go to tracer, but I don’t want to do it inside.”
“Yes sir.”
“On the ’Canal, I saw ball tracer from an idiot’s tommy gun light up a goddamn cane field. It was full of Japs, but if the wind blowed wrong, I know a Marine squad would have been fried up real good.”
“Bet you chewed him out, eh, Earl?”
“Hell, boys, couldn’t chew him out. That idiot was me!”
They all laughed. It was the first time in anyone’s memory that Earl had referred to the war or made fun of himself, a double whammy in the cult of Earl that he had spontaneously created.
D.A. came out of his little makeshift office with a briefcase full of papers, and said, “Y’all ready?”
It seemed they were.
There was a last-minute discussion of routes and timing, for it would be better if everyone arrived later, and after dark, and D.A. told them to keep their lights off as they traveled down the last half mile of dirt road before they reached the farm and not to make the turnoff if there were other cars on the highway.
Each car had an assignment: one would stop for ice, another for groceries and snacks, another for Coca-Colas.
But finally, there was nothing left to do.
“Okay, boys. We’ll see you tomorrow,” sang D.A., and the little convoy was off.
• • •
“Look, that’s fine, but something else has come up.”
The meeting was at an out-of-the-way ice cream parlor in West Hot Springs, well off the byways of the gambling town. Becker wore his usual suit and had his usual pipe; but this time, besides assorted clerks and functionaries, he had two blunt-faced State Policemen in not so plain clothes as bodyguards.
“Sir,” said D.A. patiently, as if explaining to a child, “I’m telling you we can end this thing. We can end it just like we planned. We all agreed very early on that the Central Book was the key. Now we’ve got a plan that—”
“I heard the plan the first time, Parker. I’m sure it’s a fine plan.”
“We can do it fast. Our boys are very well trained,” said Earl. “They’re probably the finest-trained police unit in the country today. We can do it and nobody gets hurt, and it’s over. You win. You’re the hero. You’re the next—”
“Earl,” said D.A. sharply.
“Yes sir,” said Earl, shutting up.
“The raids still make me uneasy,” said Becker. “Too many things can go wrong, too many people can get killed. The community doesn’t like the raids. All the killing—it makes people nervous.”
“Sir, if you’re fighting rats, some rats are bound to die,” said D.A.
“Something else has come up.”
Earl and D.A. said nothing but exchanged a brief glance.
“A source I trust, not in the police department or the municipal government, says that he was dining with his wife in the Southern Club and he saw Owney with a beautiful woman and a man he recognized from the papers as an Irish mobster called Johnny Spanish.”
Earl and D.A. ate their ice cream.
“Sir, there’s lots of gangsters come to Hot Springs.”
“Not like this one. I made some inquiries. It seems Johnny Spanish—real name John St. Jerome Aloysius O’Malley—is a noted heist expert. An armed robber. He learned his trade in the IRA in the ’20s. He specializes in banks and factory payrolls. Very violent, very smart, very tough. He has a crew of four other men, and they do the heavy work but the mob scouts their jobs and puts up the seed money.”
The two men were listening numbly. Each by now had an idea where this one was going.
“They say Johnny Spanish was in Hot Springs in 1940. Early October, 1940. Mean anything?”
“The Alcoa payroll job.”
“Exactly. So I’m thinking: Owney used Johnny before to raise money for a project—the building of the Southern. Now, you’ve put a big crimp on Owney financially with your raids. He needs cash to keep operating, to keep up his payments. His empire runs on cash. This would be the perfect time for another big job.”
“That seems like the sort of thing you’d need a big police operation for,” said D.A. “We haven’t trained for that kind of operation, Mr. Becker.”
“But you have the element of surprise! Now let me finish. I made some discreet inquiries. Alcoa sure isn’t coming through Hot Springs anymore, I’ll tell you that. But tomorrow night, the Federal Reserve Board is moving over a million dollars in gold up to Fort Knox, in Kentucky, where they’re consolidating the gold reserves. They dispersed them during the war, because they thought it was too big a target. A million bucks’ worth was moved to the Federal Reserve Bank in New Orleans. Now it’s headed back to Fort Knox, under guard of the U.S. Army, and that train is slated to run up the St. Louis & Iron Mountain tomorrow night to Little Rock, where it’ll divert to the Memphis & Little Rock and on to Kentucky tomorrow night.”
“They’re going to stop a train guarded by troops?”
“No. But suppose a bridge would catch fire? You watch. Sometime tomorrow a bridge along the St. Louis & Iron Mountain will catch fire somewhere north of Hot Springs but south of Little Rock. Or some track will be torn up. Or a tunnel will collapse. Something will happen tomorrow. The feds will divert to Hot Springs because it’s the biggest yard between New Orleans and Little Rock, and the closest. If that happens, I guarantee you, Johnny Spanish will hit that train, Owney will make a million bucks and he’ll go on and on and on.”
“You should call the FBI,” said D.A. “It’s a federal thing. They have the firepower to handle that sort of thing. I still know a few fellas in the Bureau. I’m sure they’d share the credit, Mr. Becker. That could make you look real good.”
“Oh, I’d get muscled out. I know how the FBI works. You worked for Hoover. You know what an egomaniac he is.”
The dull, pained look on D.A.’s face told the story.
“He’s right,” he finally said. “They’d push us out and it wouldn’t have nothing to do with us. J. Edgar him
self would come on down to get in all the pictures.”
“Now,” said Becker, “look at it this way. If our team does this, brings these fellows down, makes the nab, it has exactly the same effect as closing down the Central Book. Then we can hit the Central Book too, if we have to. But if we get Johnny Spanish and his boys, we link him to Owney, we save the gold, we pin the 1940 Alcoa job on him, just think of it!”
Earl said, “I don’t like night operations. They’re plenty tricky, especially on unknown ground. Everything looks different at night. You got bad communication problems, you have target-marking problems, you have terrain recognition problems. You need perimeter containment, you need experience. Lots of men died at night because their own boys got jittery.”
But D.A. responded quickly. “Yes, but Earl, think of the reward. This might be it exactly. This would put us on the map for all time. I can see the look on J. Edgar’s face if I showed up on the cover of Time magazine. Whoooeee, that chilly bastard would twitch his lips like the strange fish he is and wish to hell he’d gotten there first. Whooooeee.”
Earl saw at that moment his argument was lost. D.A. had connected with the concept in some deep way that called upon his own bitterness and seemed to validate his derailed life. It was the poison of dreams.
“Yes sir,” Earl said. “We are short on men.”
“I’ll call Carlo at his mama’s and get him back fast. And hell, I’ll go myself. I’m still the best gun in town. Ain’t as spry as I once was, but I’m still damned fast.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Fred Becker. “By God, that’s the Marine spirit!”
45
Somewhere along the way, Herman Kreutzer had picked up some expertise in electronics, so he understood Sniperscope M1 right away, and he was the one who talked Johnny Spanish through it, with guidance from War Department technical manual TM 5-9340, classified SECRET! Owney must really have had some juice to come up with something this special this fast.
The system consisted of two units linked by electrical cord: the Carbine, Caliber 30, T3 Modified, which wore the Telescope T-120 jury-rigged by special bridge mount to its receiver, and clamped beneath its forestock the infrared light source, which resembled a headlight, and behind that a plastic foregrip with the lamp trigger switch; and, three feet of cord away, the electrical power supply unit, a large metal box that supported the battery and various vacuum tubes. The whole thing weighed about eighteen pounds, loaded. The scope looked like a thermos jug, the headlamp like, well, a headlamp, and the electrical power supply like a large but utilitarian radio. You couldn’t move fast with it, you couldn’t maneuver, pivot, twist or switch angles or positions quickly.