Читать книгу Death Smells of Cordite - Gordon Landsborough - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

Farran abruptly left his office and went across to the airframe shop. There was nobody there. There wouldn’t be, of course. Only the backroom boys of the drawing office, the foremen and senior executives, would be about the place—and they’d be sitting around reading or playing quiet crap, he guessed.

He climbed the gantry moodily, and looked across that enormous shop—the second biggest in the world, he had been told. Ford had the biggest at Red Willow.

There wasn’t a stir of life, where usually it was busier than the Boulevard at Los Angeles, noisier with riveters than a ball game at the Bowl.

He looked down at the long line of aircraft—the nearest to him recognisable for what it was to be, almost completed; the farthest a mere skeleton of main spars and unclothed ribs. The biggest aircraft of their kind in the world—and a year behind schedule.

He stood there, high up in the streaming Californian sunshine, his lean figure throwing a two-hundred-foot shadow like an exclamation mark over the silent, unfinished work. And that quick, snapping anger filled him.

“Hell,” he thought, “they’ll be obsolete before they fly!”

They’d been so far ahead of competitors with their design, but these labour disputes had pulled them back until now they were probably no more advanced than some of the things other manufacturers were putting up.…

And then a tiny thought seemed to lift in his mind. It was there for a fraction of a second, to be lost when something distracted him.

But it came—it was the first time there, and there must always be a first time. It dissolved in the contours of his memory cells, forgotten almost as soon as it came, but it would come again, and perhaps next time it would be remembered.…

That dark patch under the gigantic wing of the first airframe was what distracted him. Blood. Left after the brawl of a few days ago, when some men hadn’t wanted to strike.

He went down, went the way the boys went who couldn’t be bothered to use the steps—crooked his feet around the handrails and slid down like an old-time fireman on his brass pole.

And it wasn’t blood. It was an oil stain. Someone must have cleaned up the traces of the brawl.

He stood under that fuselage, which towered twenty feet above him, and would be still higher from the ground when the six-wheeled undercarriage was mounted.

It was all wing, almost. Swept back, and with turbo-jet engines mounted as pushers on the trailing edge—eight of them. And British, of course. The British were still ahead with aero-engines.

No room in the fuselage. Comparatively, that was. Space for the crew up forward, of course, and they could take a couple of jeeps or a few small field guns. That wasn’t considered a load at all for aircraft as big as this.

And it was big—those wings were the biggest things that ever cast a shadow over earth, even though that earth had been concreted over in the airframe assembly shop. That was, excluding nature’s clouds, of course.

They ought to be. Two hundred men would sit inside, one hundred in the port wing, one hundred to starboard. They’d sit and look ahead without any interruption to their vision; for the leading edge was almost continuous perspex.

Farran mooched out of the deserted shop thinking, “I wouldn’t like to sit up there. Not in real operations.” Yet he had flown Mustangs over France and Germany in that big beat-up at the time of the Second Front, and that hadn’t worried him. But this was different, sitting with a hundred and ninety-nine other men, waiting to be dropped. Marines, they’d be, America’s elite fighters. For these were the first of fifty troop carriers ordered by the U.S. Navy.

He went through the Administrative Block. There were a few people here, because work could go on for a time even without their ten thousand union-bound employees in the shops.

They jumped into frenzied action when they saw the boss walking the corridors, though the girls took care to let him see their nylons and flashed him their best, dressing table rehearsed smiles. A man who owned a multi-million dollar concern—and a few other odd investments—was quite a guy and worth a bit of hopeful bait. And when he was young with it, tough with it, and reasonably good-looking, well, a girl could even forget that flaming bad temper of his.

Just now he was moody. He didn’t see them. He didn’t know what to do, didn’t know where to go. His life stopped when the pulse died in this gigantic aircraft works that his father had started as an offshoot to his aluminium alloy concern—now, comparatively, only another odd investment.

He paused outside the door marked Labour Relations. Uncle El would be there. El Farran, who had talked with union leaders so long he looked like one. Heavy-jowled, leather-faced, as yellow as a time sheet. Beglassed, with thick lenses so you couldn’t quite see what was going on in his mind through betraying eyes.

Farran went into the department, putting everyone in a flurry, crossed to Uncle El’s room and opened the door. The boss doesn’t knock. Leastways, Russ Farran didn’t.

Uncle El was on the phone. He was shouting for Washington. That was where the biggest crooks were, thought Farran cynically. Uncle El was swinging round in his swivel chair, jacket off, tie loosened. And bawling. Mad.

“What the—? Washington, Washington.… Yeah, yeah, that’s the number I want.… The hell, not there? Then why didn’t you say so?”

Smash went the receiver on the stand, and Uncle El came whirling round. He liked to give an impression of a big shot tycoon, thought Farran cynically. He liked to be a man of power. Well, he was big enough, maybe too big, he thought. His father always swore he was the best Labour Relations Officer in the United States, and one time he’d seemed to be. But not this last year. The Farran plant had the worst record for labour disputes anywhere.

Farran didn’t understand it, couldn’t. And that was why that triggering little thought that had come to him was important. Because he was beginning to think their record was too bad.

Uncle El saw him, stopped swinging. Farran couldn’t see those eyes behind the lenses, but the glass itself gave an appearance of pale, dead-fish orbs.

El said, “That was Washington.”

Farran said, “It sounded like Washington.” Whenever you had dealings with Washington you got good and mad.

Then Uncle El just sat and said nothing more. Farran couldn’t think of anything to say, so after a few seconds he nodded and went back into the corridor. Then he decided to go down to the gate and see the pickets.

As he came up to where the gate police were, just inside the high, steel-meshed gates, the public address system began its daily dose to the strikers.

Uncle El had had those loudspeakers fixed up on the edge of the car park after the first strike nearly a year ago. He was a pretty smart man, Uncle El; he made sure that he could get a hearing with the strikers with those powerful broadcast units.

Farran couldn’t tell what he was saying. You never could when you were on this side of the fence, because the loudspeakers were directed out towards the car park where the strikers were.

The announcement stopped as he went through the gate. There was the “wedge” at the gate, that group of sullen, tough-faced pickets whose duty it was to make a solid barrier across the gateway when would-be workers or trucks tried to go in. Not that anyone had entertained such thoughts for a few days now.

The main body of pickets had made themselves comfortable on the edge of the car park. They had plenty of room. There weren’t two hundred cars where normally two thousand workers’ vehicles stood.

The strike leader had got a trailer parked, so that he was always on the spot for talks. The boys had fixed him with electric light and a telephone, so that he could ring his wife and tell her how he much he missed her, the liar. For themselves they’d got beach chairs on the concrete, and there was more card-playing and dice-throwing than you’d see even downtown on a Sunday.

When Farran came out, the card-playing stopped. Every eye came round to the boss. He gave them the eye back, and some shuffled and looked quickly away. While he was watching a truck trundled to a stop and opened up. It was the chuck wagon for the picket. Some of the strikers went up to it immediately, but most stood and watched what Farran was going to do.

He went over to look at the wagon. It was a properly equipped mobile food bar, all streamlined and chromium.

Farran said, “You sure do yourselves well.”

The smell of hot coffee came richly to his nose, and there were hotdogs and hamburgers in the hot box to make the afternoon even more aromatic.

A big man, first in the queue, came round with a mouthful of hamburger and sneered, “Why not, brother? Guess you don’t do bad yourself with all your millions.”

Farran had seen him before at the gate. He was always there, the most assiduous striker. And the toughest. He came back with his mouth at the slightest opportunity. His raucous, irritating voice prompted Farran to mentally dub him the “yawp.” That’s what he was.

Farran looked at him. He was nearly his own height, but heavier. Much heavier. There was a pile of stomach trying to bust the strap he wore around his pants. And the pants looked sleep-weary, as if he bedded down in them. The face wasn’t as soft-looking as the middle, though it was stubbly-unshaven, and the hair looked as though it had been scratched on rising and not otherwise combed since. A tough, mocking face.

Farran said, “I won’t have many millions left, soon. This strike’s costing me half a million a week. You figure how long I can last before it’ll be no good picketing the place anymore.”

But it didn’t shake the strikers any. They knew modern finance and economics now. Knew that the Farran plant couldn’t die, couldn’t go out of existence, no matter how much it lost. They wouldn’t scrap the Boulder Dam even though it was losing millions a year. Or the whole of the Tennessee Valley scheme. Or Fords or Boeings or Lockheeds, to bring it nearer to aviation.

Because they were national assets. With war apparently never far ahead, such firms couldn’t be allowed to die.

Anyway, in the fat years the Treasury took most of their profits, and when they had a lean year, as this, they were able to draw back. So it didn’t matter a damn, in many ways, and the wise guys knew it.

The yawp said, brusquely, “It don’t cost you nothin’. But it costs the workers more’n half a million bucks a week in lost pay. I don’t give no tears for the poor li’l rich fellar called Farran no more.”

Farran heard an admiring, “Just lissen to Mac! He ain’t scared of no one!”

“Scared?” Sag-belly scratched under his shirt. “What in hell’s there anything to be scared of in this fellar?”

It got Farran mad. “By God,” he snarled, “someday you’ll be back at your job. So help me, when that day comes I’ll be after your hide, fellar!”

“You got me scared,” said the big yawp, but his sneer was twice as big. “You want another strike when this one’s over? You want another walkout because I’m bein’ victimised, huh?”

Shooting off his mouth he was, standing up to the boss and being truculent. And the other men watched and admired. It was as well that someone stood up to Russ Farran, they thought; few men ever did.

The big yawp finished and shouted up another coffee and hamburger. Farran complained, “I don’t suppose the boss gets more’n a smell of that coffee?”

The yawp spoke with a mouth full. “Brother, you supposed right. This is for the oppressed workers.”

“Oppressed? God knows what you’re striking for now!”

And he didn’t. They’d been in and out so often, especially in the last six months, he couldn’t quite remember what it was this time. Something to do with the Social Security scheme.

He left the pickets in full enjoyment of better hamburgers than he’d get downtown and got into his car. He was thinking of the Social Security scheme. It had misfired, badly, and he couldn’t understand why.

They’d had so much trouble. Farran had thought up this scheme to show labour he wasn’t antagonistic to their interests. And yet it had recoiled on him. He knew the trouble was they were completely suspicious of him, they suspected double-dealing in everything he did. And he couldn’t understand why.

The hell, he thought, stabbing for the starter button, he didn’t give a damn about anything except putting his beloved planes out. Labour was welcome to the best they could get out of the deal, the best he could give them, with a bank holding most of the mortgages, and ten thousand shareholders owning thirty-five percent of the shares. But they wouldn’t get the best with this series of wildcat strikes to strangle production. No one got the best out of such things.

He threw his car into a skid deliberately, passing the chuck wagon. The yawp was on another hamburger, sneering as he passed. The dust shot up quickly from the slipping wheels and got him nicely. Farran heard the crowd laugh to see him put one over so neatly on the big yawp. They always kept their humour, those boys, that was one good thing.

It put Farran in a good temper, and he took a look back. The yawp was saying things and trying to get the dirt off his hamburger.

Farran went to town. He didn’t know what to do there, but he knew he couldn’t do anything profitable out at the plant. That was a dead place, and for the moment he was better out of it, leaving things to Labour Relations Officer Uncle El.

As he drove into Los Angeles, he kept wondering why a perfectly good scheme, designed to give the men security, should be so misinterpreted. But no sooner had he put up the idea than there’d been trouble—trouble somehow ending in a walkout.

They’d got the idea that the weekly deductions to pay for the scheme (though the firm put up half the money, in the end) was an attempt to cut their wages. It took some working out, thought Farran cynically, but that’s how they’d got it in their heads. They argued that for years—on an average twenty years—the Farran concern would be having the use of part of their earnings. Multiplied by ten thousand, it represented millions. They thought it was a swindle. And somehow, because they were touchy, they’d come out on strike.

Farran thought, “There’s more to it than this,” but couldn’t think what it was.

He gave the red coupé a lot of gas, going over the plain towards the screen of hills behind L.A. It was a pretty good car, as it should have been, because it had cost half a million to make.

It could do around a hundred and forty, so he’d been told, though he’d never tried to shove the needle up so far. He liked to tool around at a modest pace; he wasn’t in any hurry when he was on four wheels. Eighty suited him—or maybe an occasional ninety when there weren’t any kinks in the road. But not speeding. He liked to do his speeding at least twenty thousand feet above sharp bends and traffic snarls.

Farran let the needle doodle around the eighty figure. Burt might be a sorehead, but he sure could design a car—given half a million or so.

It had been Burt’s idea. Right after the war, when cancellation came in for combat planes and the mighty Farran plant stood nearly as empty as it was now, Brother Burt had come up with the scheme. Aviation, according to him, was pretty well through. There’d be no more wars, and what chance had civil aviation alone of keeping this mighty plant going?

So he said, “The world needs cars. They’ll never get enough automobiles, because we’re building roads now to burn ’em out within a couple of years. Okay, let’s turn Farrans over to making good, fast autos.”

He even brought Henry Ford up to clinch the argument, though it was an argument in reverse. “Ford turned from making cars to making planes, didn’t he? What Ford can do that way, we can do oppositely.”

It had been his brainchild—and he had a good brain for designing, though it wasn’t geared to practical production techniques.

The baby took a long while to emerge. Maybe there was more to making a car than looked from the outside, as Henry Kaiser was also beginning to find. When a year had passed, and half a million in research was down the drain, Farran put a stop to the agony.

“We know how to make planes,” he said. “Okay, we’ll stick to making ’em. We’ll gamble on the market picking up within a couple or three years, and we’ll go ahead with carrier planes.”

It had picked up. And but for these strikes, they’d have been sitting pretty, too. The one prototype car made, hand-built down to the last nut and bolt, almost, was a beauty, though not to be bought at such a price ever again.

And it had done some good, because Burt wouldn’t come near the factory now. Burt stayed home these days and sulked, because he hadn’t been given the fifty million he’d found they’d need to get even a modest assembly line moving. He still got up ostentatiously when Farran came into the room, and stalked silently out.

Farran turned into the Boulevard some time later, and thought that was one good thing, anyway, getting rid of Burt. The Farran plant was stiff with relatives, and he didn’t give a darn for any of them. Not many, anyway.

He stopped off at Clem Cole’s bar and had lunch, though the coffee didn’t have the smell of that strong brew from the strikers’ wagon, and the hamburgers definitely lacked virility. Then he got back into his car and turned towards Santa Monica Harbour.

Maybe with this wind offshore he’d do some sailing. There wasn’t anything else to do, and sailing did take your mind off bellyaches. And he’d got a nice boat all waiting for him.

Two blocks from Clem’s he saw Lydia van Heuson. She had come out of Macartneys and looked about to get a taxi. She was dressed to kill, and the moment she saw Farran she thought he was the answer.

Farran trailed his eyes away just as he saw Lydia’s face brighten and her hand come up. Then he went right on past her, just as if she wasn’t there. “The hell, she can buy a taxi,” he thought. He’d been out with Lydia plenty times, and she wasn’t for him anymore. Not for a mind soured by a strike back over the hills costing half a million a week.

But it did something, seeing Lydia. He went right across, instead of coming left at the next intersection—even avoiding a woman brought you trouble. And that meant driving on to the next crossing and making the turn there.

In itself, with all those horses prancing under the bonnet, that was no hardship, but coming into the unaccustomed turn Farran remembered the name of the street—and a number.

He stopped on an impulse. This was where Joe McMee had set up office a couple of months back—he’d promised to look him up and hadn’t, and always when he remembered he’d felt a bit of a heel in consequence.

They’d been through college together, Joe McMee and Russ Farran. Joe had been a better boy in the lecture room than on the football field, and he’d only made the team in a few games, but Farran had got to know—and like—him during those times.

A good, steady, plodding type, Joe, yet curiously brilliant on occasions. A man of contradictory character, Farran thought. Joe had joined the F.B.I. when his degree came through, and for a few years was quietly out of everybody’s ken.

Then he’d hit the headlines, digging out some of the Detroit Chopper Boys. In his curious way he had had his usual flash of brilliance and made good.

He’d spoken to Farran over the phone on making L.A. He’d quit the F.B.I. Farran felt the regret in his voice. He’d married, got a wife who thought there was no sense in taking risks.

“She’s right,” Joe’s slow, heavy voice had come over the wire to Farran. “I got hurt with the Chopper Boys. Bad. And that’s something you’ve always got to expect in the Bureau. Getting hurt, I mean.”

So, for his wife’s sake, he’d quit the G-job and set up office here in L.A. No, he didn’t call himself a detective, Joe told him modestly. Just a private investigator. Now, there must be a lot of things needed investigating at a place as big as Farrans.…

Farran promised to look him up some time when he was in town, and turned him over to his Labour Relations Officer, who might find work for him. Farran hadn’t thought to ask Uncle El how Joe had made out with him.

He got out of his car slowly. He didn’t really want to meet Joe. Not while he was in this broody mood. They’d been pals at college, but friendships kind of died as the years of maturity piled up. Still, out of politeness, now he was in the district, he’d drop in on Joe. Perhaps Joe wouldn’t be in, he thought hopefully. Then he’d be able to go sailing with an easy conscience.

He went up. Joe’s office looked like any of the other hundreds in the same building. Just one door with his name in black across the glass—Joe McMee, Private Investigator. Farran walked through without knocking. It’s a habit you get when you own hundreds of doors and you want to save seconds of time all day.

There was no one in the microscopic reception office, but Farran saw that the inner office door was slightly open, so he went straight on through the little swing gate and walked in on Joe McMee.

Joe was lying on his back, one foot stuck in a wire wastepaper basket. His chair was over on its side against the wall, and there were some—but not many—papers on the floor.

Farran stopped in the doorway, and was immediately impressed by the stillness, the quietness of that office. Especially the stillness of Joe.

So he went cautiously a couple of paces into the room and saw then that Joe would never make another noise this side of wherever good Joes go.

A blue-rimmed hole made a startlingly vivid mark on Joe’s right temple, just where the hair was thinning back. A hole that could have been made by a spinning .38 bullet. A hole that was big enough, in that place, to spill the life out of anyone.

Anyway, it had spilled the life out of big Joe McMee, private investigator.