“Why does anyone break a law?” A man roughly ten years younger than Reynolds answered him with another question. “For profit. And there’s a lot of profit in Prohibition.”
“No! God damn it to hell, no!” Reynolds spun around in his chair and slammed his pipe on the desk blotter. “You’re wrong! This Scarlatti has more money than our combined imaginations can conceive of. It’s like saying the Mellons are going to open a bookmaking parlor in Philadelphia. It doesn’t make sense.… Join me in a drink?”
It was after five and Group Twenty’s staff was gone for the day. Only the man named Glover and Ben Reynolds remained.
“You shock me, Ben,” Glover said with a grin.
“Then to hell with you. I’ll save it for myself.”
“You do that and I’ll turn you in.… Good stuff?”
“Right off the boat from old Blighty, they tell me.” Reynolds took a leather-bound flask out of his top drawer and two water glasses from a desk tray and poured.
“If you rule out profits, what the devil have you got left, Ben?”
“Damned if I know,” replied the older man, drinking.
“What are you going to do? I gather no one else wants to do anything.”
“Yes, siree! That is no, siree! Nobody wants to touch this.… Oh, they’ll go after Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones with a vengeance. They’ll prosecute the hell out of some poor slob in East Orange, New Jersey, with a case in his basement. But not this one!”
“You lost me, Ben.”
“This is the Scarlatti Industries! This is big, powerful friends on the Hill! Remember, Treasury needs money, too. It gets it up there.”
“What do you want to do, Ben?”
“I want to find out why the mammoth’s tusk is plunging into bird feed.”
“How?”
“With Canfield. He’s partial to bird feed himself, the poor son of a bitch.”
“He’s a good man, Ben.” Glover did not like the sound of Reynold’s invective. He liked Matthew Canfield. He thought he was talented, quick. There but for the money to complete an education was a young man with a future. Too good for government service. A lot better than either of them.… Well, better than himself, better than a man named Glover who didn’t care anymore. There weren’t many people better than Reynolds.
Benjamin Reynolds looked up at his subordinate. He seemed to be reading his thoughts. “Yes, he’s a good man.… He’s in Chicago. Go out and call him. His routing must be somewhere.”
“I have it in my desk.”
“Then get him in here by tomorrow night.”
CHAPTER 6
Matthew Canfield, field accountant, lay in his Pullman berth, and smoked the next to last thin cigar in his pack. They had no thin cigars on the New York–Chicago Limited and he inhaled each breath of smoke with a degree of sacrifice.
In the early morning he would reach New York, transfer to the next train south, and be in Washington ahead of schedule. That would make a better impression on Reynolds than arriving in the evening. That would show that he, Canfield, could close a problem quickly, with no loose ends left dangling. Of course, with his current assignment it wasn’t difficult. He had completed it several days ago but had remained in Chicago as the guest of the senator he had been sent to confront about payroll allocations to nonexistent employees.
He wondered why he had been called back to Washington. He always wondered why he was called back. Probably because he believed deeply that it was never just another job but, instead, that someday, somehow Washington would be on to him. Group Twenty would be on to him.
They would confront him.
With evidence.
But it was unlikely. It hadn’t happened. Matthew Canfield was a professional—minor level, he granted to himself—but still a professional. And he had no regrets whatsoever. He was entitled to every wooden nickel he could dig up.
Why not? He never took much. He and his mother deserved something. It had been a federal court in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which had pasted the sheriff’s notice on his father’s store. A federal judge who had rendered the determination—Involuntary Bankruptcy. The federal government hadn’t listened to any explanations other than the fact that his father no longer had the ability to pay his debts.
For a quarter of a century a man could work, raise a family, get a son off to the state university—so many dreams fulfilled, only to be destroyed with the single banging of a wooden gavel upon a small marble plate in a courtroom.
Canfield had no regrets.
“You have a new occupation to get under your belt, Canfield. Simple procedures. Not difficult.”