The Mercenaries (16 page)

In addition, the two old guns he’d got working were absorbing his attention in his spare time and, whenever he could obtain ammunition, he took them like new toys to the range they’d built with coolie labour and, with Lawn to instruct him and a gallery of gaping Chinese to cheer and turn somersaults at the noise, test-fired them into the sandbank, cursing like an old soldier at split cases and double-feeds.

There was an expression of bewilderment and warmth in Ellie’s eyes as she watched him. She seemed to have put on a little weight in the last three weeks and the hollows in her cheeks had filled out.

‘Don’t you ever rest, Sammy?’ she asked.

Sammy stared back at her, his face expressionless. He had always regarded Fagan as a harbinger of chaos and had never quite managed to get on with Ellie, although she had given him every encouragement.

‘Earning money,’ he said briskly. ‘First time in me life. Good money, too. Stuffing it away like a squirrel in me cheeks, thanks to Ira.’

Even away from the airfield, he seemed delighted with everything. His association with Mei-Mei seemed to have grown warmer and he was picking up the language at a tremendous rate and could even write Chinese characters with a brush now. Often in the evening, Ira found the two of them with their heads together, Sammy rapt with attention, the girl, fragile without make-up or any affectations of dress, in plain grey cotton trousers and smock, chattering away to him in a high sing-song voice that Sammy seemed able to answer.

Sammy’s opinion, delivered so casually, was clearly not far from the mark. Tsu was growing nervous.

Yet, in spite of the occasional groups of Tsu soldiers wandering along the bund and across the Tien-An Men steps, shabby, ill-clothed and bullying, and the sampans that were stolen to ferry them across the river, there appeared to be very little military movement in the province. General Tsu seemed to be firmly established with his yamen to the north of the city, surrounded by officers, cars, women and eunuchs, counting his money and fumbling half-heartedly towards the lakes, and of Kwei there was suddenly no sign beyond cavalry patrols to the south. Only General Chiang in Canton seemed to be on the move in the whole of China, pushing his agents inexorably northwards to increase the influence of the Nationalist party and issuing threats that at any moment he was going to overthrow everyone who opposed them.

But Canton was a long way to the south and life in Hwai-Yang seemed to be established in a pattern of everlasting repairs and very little flying. Overnight almost, petrol seemed to have disappeared entirely from the province. It had always had to come up-river in forty-gallon drums, laboriously loaded on to a junk in Shanghai and as laboriously off-loaded at its destination, and in an area where transport was almost entirely ox, horse or man-hauled, it had always had to be carefully conserved. Getting it, even with Lao’s help, had always involved a day of threats and cajoling and a great deal of squeeze, but the absence now was so marked, so complete and so final; it had finally begun to dawn on Ira that the shortage was due to a more sinister reason than the store-owners merely hanging on to it to get more squeeze.

There were one or two outbreaks of trouble along the bund and one of Tsu’s soldiers was murdered by an infuriated coolie sick of his bullying. The coolie was promptly shot by a sergeant, but this time the incident provoked an angry crowd into rampaging round the city centre for two hours smashing windows. As a riot, it never quite came off and was soon put down by the Tsu soldiers, but then they heard a group of merchants had been executed for objecting to the worthless Tsu banknotes he printed in exchange for coin. They had been marched along the river bank, dressed in mourning white, followed by soldiers and a coolie with a two-handed sword, and ten minutes later the soldiers were marching away and the wailing women were pawing among the scattered rubbish for the severed heads so they could be placed in the correct coffins and the bodies sent to their ancestors without losing face.

‘Trouble, Majah Ira,’ Peter Cheng said shrewdly. ‘Always riots and executions when warlord in danger.’

Ira looked quickly at him. Apart from the absence of petrol and the far-from-unusual riot, nothing appeared to have changed much, but there was an undoubted atmosphere of uncertainty and ill-omen about the city that evening and, feeling in his bones he ought to make preparations for whatever was coming and giving credit to the Chinese for having an instinctive nose for danger after generations of living with it, he gave instructions that no one was to go far from the field. The situation had an ominous feel about it.

It was the first indication, the first subtle suggestion, that the ridiculous pantomime in which they were involved was not merely play-acting, and that all the manoeuvring that Kwei and Tsu had been doing over the past few weeks round the Yung Ling Lakes was war. The warlords were shrewd brutal men, and foul-play had been the code of Chinese politics for a long time, but in the cottages of the peasants the revolutionary tenets from the south were beginning to take hold, and the ancient trinity of landlord, loan shark and merchant that was supported by the generals was beginning to feel the pinch of hatred even as far up-river as Hwai-Yang.

They had often heard of other warlord confrontations but they had always seemed to be resolved with an exchange of courtesies and a large number of dollars, but now there was a feeling in the air that the days when bribery could be offered were finished and that a warlord could no longer govern an entire province with his army, and its counties, cities and towns with his captains. It was the first realisation that the jockeying for control that Kwei and Tsu had been conducting for half a generation could only be resolved by bloodshed and death.

In spite of the clear unease that hung over Hwai-Yang, there was no sign of trouble at the airfield, and Ellie had even started joining them every morning with Mei-Mei for breakfast. The singing they heard from her bungalow had begun to come more often and more light-heartedly when a telegram arrived to say that Fagan was on his way back.

‘Oh, Gawd,’ Sammy said softly, glancing at Ellie’s flattened expression. ‘Here comes trouble again! ‘

Ira handed the telegram back to Ellie and she crumpled it up without a word and, rising from the table, went silently to her own bungalow.

They were on the bund as the
Fan-Ling
was warped alongside the jetty, pushing through the hordes of Chinese waiting to greet its arrival or take passage farther up-river, the few white businessmen and the inevitable missionary. The din was deafening and the stench appalling.

Fagan was yellow and shaking as he pushed off the gangplank, and his eyes were dull, sickly and veined with red, and he walked stiffly upright as though he were terrified of leaning too far forward. There was little sign of pleasure at his return in Ellie’s angry face, and her expression had lost all its relaxed vitality.

‘Malaria,’ he explained with a pale imitation of his crazy laugh.

‘Rye,’ Ellie corrected him shortly. ‘You’ve been on a drunk. You’re still hung over.’

Fagan gestured irritably. ‘Hold your whist, woman,’ he said. ‘I’m always getting it.’

‘Not that goddam often.’

Fagan was wearing a new linen suit and carrying a suitcase full of knick-knacks for them all. He hadn’t forgotten even the hostile Sammy, for whom he’d brought back a new leather flying jacket to replace the old one Ira had given him two years before. For Ira he produced a watch, Swiss-made and elaborately faced.

‘It’s got as many dials on it as the dashboard of a Handley Page,’ Ira observed with a grin.

Fagan gestured with a magnanimous expansiveness that was a little marred by the fact that it clearly set all sorts of bells and whistles going inside his head. ‘It’s a peace offerin’, no less, me old ardent boyo,’ he said. ‘To show there’s no ill feelin’.’

With a trembling hand he offered cigarettes all round, studied closely by the tense unimpressed Ellie, who was watching him warily and with no sign of affection.

‘What’s it all for?’ she asked unexpectedly across the conversation. ‘The only time you ever bought me candy was when you’d spent your wages on a night with a dame. Go ahead, what have you forgotten to do?’

At Ellie’s words, apprehension and doubt had hit Ira like a blow in the stomach, and he forgot about the watch at once. A man like Fagan, whose promises were always worthless currency, would be just the sort to offer gifts to hide his failure.

‘What about the spares?’ he asked. ‘Did you get ‘em?’

To his surprise, Fagan nodded. ‘Sure I did,’ he said at once. ‘All we want.’

‘Where are they all?’ Sammy asked shortly.

Fagan gestured airily. ‘Petrol’s coming up from Hong Kong by rail to Tsosiehn and down-river from there. Spares coming behind. Chap called De Sa at Tsosiehn’s handling it all. Eddie Kowalski’s still organising most of ‘em.’

Ira’s brows came down in a grim line. ‘Didn’t you organise ‘em?’

‘I gave the list to Kowalski. That’s what he’s there for.’ Ira’s brows came down in a grim line. ‘In fact, then,’ he said bluntly, ‘you
haven’t
got ‘em, after all.’

Fagan’s temper exploded in a shout. ‘Have I not done my bloody best?’ he yelled. He fished a list from his pocket and began to read from it. ‘Here y’are: Dope. Paint. Turnbuckles. Gaskets. Pumps ...’

‘Never mind the goddam list, you bog Irishman,’ Ellie interrupted in a harsh voice that was almost a scream. ‘We know what’s on it. Did you
get
‘em?’

Fagan paused and frowned, twisting before her steady contemptuous gaze like a fish on a hook. Already he seemed to have shrunk like a punctured balloon, diminished in sound, size and importance.

‘Well, hell . . .’ he began. Then he stopped and ground out his cigarette, not meeting their eyes. ‘The parts for the Avro have got to come from Europe,’ he said.

‘They could have got them from Singapore or the Middle East, Ira snapped. ‘What about the other machines?’

‘There was nothing at all for the German machines.’ Fagan frowned again and tossed away the crushed cigarette. ‘There are no bloody spares for German machines anywhere these days,’ he burst out in despair.

The argument that followed seemed to go on for the rest of the morning, sickening, repetitive and depressing. By the end of it, Ellie had a bitter expression in her eyes again and she and Fagan were barely on speaking terms.

‘Ach, God,’ Fagan burst out, goaded into defiance by her unrelenting anger. ‘Let’s throw up the contracts then, woman, and go home! ‘

She swung round on him in a rage. ‘We’re not going any place, you dumb cluck,’ she stormed. ‘I’ve told you we can’t afford to. What have you ever gotten together that we can live on? Where can we go? The States? We can’t even afford the goddam fare!‘

Fagan’s resistance collapsed at last. It was obvious the trip to Shanghai had been a disaster. He had no money and was heavily in debt again, and more than ever dependent on Ellie.

‘Where then, Ellie?’ he said, his eyes hurt and bewildered. ‘I’ve only got nine dollars between me and all harm.’

There was a frightened appeal in his voice that stopped her anger like a brick wall. Her fury had seemed to thrive on his evasions and defiance, but now, as he collapsed into a scared uncomprehending child of a man, she seemed to control herself with an effort and they saw her fists clench. She turned, her voice calmer.

‘We’ll find somewhere,’ she said quietly. ‘Soon as we’ve gathered some money together. Somewhere we can have a home and roots. It doesn’t matter much, so long as we can stay still and quit moving.’

Fagan nodded and sighed. As he rose to his feet and buttoned his coat, Ellie watched him with eyes that contained a hint of compassion despite the despair. He lit a cigarette with shaking fingers.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph intercede for me,’ he said heavily. ‘Me brain’s slopping about in me head as if it was liquid. Why does God have it in for me so?’

When he got back to the bungalow that night Ira found Sammy and Mei-Mei sitting in wicker chairs in the garden, drinking tea from ornamental mugs like Victorian tobacco jars complete with lids. Mei-Mei had woven garlands of peonies and chrysanthemums and put them round their necks. They seemed to be having an English lesson.

‘Right,’ Sammy was saying briskly. ‘You say “Good morning”.’

She looked up at him, her face close to his. ‘Me say ...’ ‘No, no, no.’ Sammy stopped her abruptly. ‘You got to get it right: I say.’

‘
You
say?’

‘No, no. You say.’

Mei-Mei’s brow wrinkled in perplexity. ‘
Me
say?’

Sammy looked up at Ira. ‘Lor’,’ he said heavily. ‘You’d be surprised how difficult it is.’

Ira was dusty and tired enough to want to go to bed early. He had spent the afternoon and evening conducting his everlasting search through the godowns along the bund for petrol and the crowds in the city had seemed restless and hostile. Swarming up the great Tien-An Men steps in a way that was not merely hurried, the coolies had been angry and agitated, and he’d seen groups of students haranguing them in the narrow alleys.

For a long time he found it difficult to go to sleep because the house servants were having a concert and were creating mayhem at the back of the bungalow with cymbals, gongs, bones and a one-stringed fiddle, and when he slipped off at last, it was only to wake with a start to the sound of voices outside the door.

Sammy put his head in. ‘I think Pat Fagan and Ellie are killing each other, Ira,’ he said. ‘Can’t you hear ‘em?’

The shouting from the next bungalow brought Ira up in bed with a jerk. He listened for a moment, then he shrugged.

‘I don’t suppose we’ll miss ‘em much if they do,’ he said.

They went on to the verandah, where Mei-Mei was standing, holding a kimono about her small frame, and listened to the sound of crashing household equipment from across the lawn. The noise was backgrounded by the banging of fireworks from the city instead of the usual night-time silence and somehow it seemed ominous.

‘Sounds like trouble down there,’ Ira said, glancing towards the river.