The Mercenaries (7 page)

‘After that it was Ches,’ Fagan burst in noisily. That seemed to be the end of a perfect day. We came here.’

Ellie nodded. ‘We kept putting the planes together,’ she said in a flat disinterested voice, ‘but you can’t put a dead man together again.’

Ira glanced at Kowalski. He had a shrewd idea what their display had been like--no discipline and no maintenance, and backed by even less money than he’d had himself.

‘Let’s have a look at the planes,’ he said.

The two machines, stripped of non-essentials and devoid of guns, were heavily patched and sadly in need of varnish, dope and paint, and Ira saw now that the D7’s cockpit had been enlarged and a second cramped seat fitted behind the pilot’s. Judging by the names scrawled on the fabric inside, it had found its way on to the market via the United States Army Air Force. From the inspection sheets and log books that Ellie produced, the Albatros had had an even more chequered history and had turned up via Roumania, Turkey and Italy.

‘Ches got them from a park outside Rome,’ Ellie said in her flat drawl. ‘I guess they’ve been around a bit. They were all there were at our price. The big guys got all the two-seaters. We converted the D7 ourselves but it never flew well with two in it. They were O.K. for putting on a show but not for trips round the airfield.’

Watched by the gaping coolies, they pulled aside the tarpaulin and Ira climbed into the Fokker’s cockpit, with Ellie standing alongside explaining the controls.

‘B.M.W. 3-A engine,’ she said. ‘Six-cylinder in-line. Welded-tubing fuselage. Wings one piece. Spars run from end to end. Makes ‘em strong. She’s got no bad habits and with twenty gallons of gas she’ll stay up for an hour forty-five. The Albatros’s got an increased compression ratio and we’re supposed to get ten horse more than the standard one-twenty but we never do.’

It was Ellie, not Fagan, who supplied the answers to Ira’s questions, and it seemed to have been Ellie who had run their air display.

She was still standing on the step, her head inside the cockpit, when Kowalski interrupted and jerked a hand. The Thorneycroft towing the Avro was bumping across the field at an alarming rate, the plane swinging wildly from side to side behind, the crates bouncing about in the rear of the lorry as it roared towards them, followed by a horde of gay scabrous children shrieking in the cloud of dust it raised and with Sammy banging on the hood yelling for the driver to slow down.

The coolies had risen to their feet at Kowalski’s exclamation and were huddled in a group with their children and the women, staring across the field, their chattering stilled, their jaws hanging, their eyes full of joyful anticipation. Ellie was standing alongside the Fokker as Ira climbed to the ground and she flashed a quick glance at him, as though wondering how he would react.

The lorry stopped in front of Kowalski and the Chinese driver jumped down.

‘Fly machine have got,’ he said with a grin

Pushing through the crowd, Ira saw at once that one of the Avro’s undercarriage struts was cracked. A wheel was bent also and, through a gash in the fabric, he saw one of the longeron struts was smashed and several control wires snapped.

Sammy was jumping down from the lorry, almost in tears, his face puffed and bruised.

‘That bastard Geary did it, Ira,’ he explained, chattering with rage and dismay. ‘He backed the lorry into it. He was in a hurry and wouldn’t let the Chink do it.’

Ira peered at him. ‘What happened to your face?’ he demanded.

‘Geary. When I told him what he’d done.’

Ira’s eyes narrowed. ‘Where’s Mr. Bloody Geary now?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know, Ira. Honest. They both of ‘em hopped it. I grabbed a wrench to hit him with but they’d gone. We’re on our own.’

The expedition seemed to have got off to a somewhat inauspicious start. They had three unassembled aircraft, one of them damaged and all of them old and too often repaired, no fitters, no equipment, very few tools and at least one pilot who seemed to be slightly unbalanced.

‘This little tea-party appears to be jammed full of exciting possibilities,’ Ira observed ruefully to Sammy.

He wasn’t far wrong. Within a week it had become quite clear that nothing, whether business or pleasure, could be done directly in China. Every approach was devious and protracted, and nothing could be achieved without a middleman’s rake-off, or ‘squeeze’, and, staring at the instructions given him by Lao at Moshi, at Kowalski’s letters, at the notebook that was suddenly full of things which had to be done, and the lists of all the things they were lacking, Ira was conscious of a sad letting-down of the spirit.

‘Let’s hope there’s a bit more bloody organisation in Hwai-Yang,’ he said with feeling.

Fortunately, Kowalski was well used to the tortuous delays and the complex methods of working, and wasn’t in the slightest put out. He had conducted them to their hotel and had seen them installed, talking business with Ira all the time, filling a notebook with his lists of demands, unflurried by the need for urgency and the prospect of unfailing vacillation on the part of the Chinese. Though it took time, he began to find them tools, drills, hacksaws, lamps, batteries, oil, grease, paint, a lathe, and even a small petrol generator.

‘Tsu’s going to start squealing soon,’ he grinned as he turned them over to Ira. ‘He was never known for his generosity and this little lot’s going to cost him a packet of dollars, believe me.’

‘We haven’t even started yet,’ Ira commented grimly.

To their surprise, and although they spent most of their time on the Chinese side of the Yangtze, their arrival had not gone unnoticed; and a few red-faced English matrons, picking up their wavelength on the grapevine of gossip, began to call at their hotel, leaving cards and inviting them to cocktail parties. For the most part they were large and frozen-faced and seemed to consider they were doing them a favour.

Wealth and position were the criteria of virtue in white Shanghai and they were obviously expected to take up their proper place in an accepted hierarchy with the British Minister and his satellites at the top. The invitations were strictly formal and never failed to have Ira’s correct rank and every one of his decorations in the right order.

‘God, they do things right out here, don’t they?’ he observed to Kowalski, turning over a sheet of pasteboard as big as the blade of a shovel.

‘Brother,’ Kowalski laughed, ‘you just try and do ‘em
wrong
.’

Ira tapped the pasteboard. ‘Think we ought to go?’ he asked.

‘It’ll maybe grease a few wheels and open a few doors.’

The party was not the success they had hoped for, however, because Fagan drank too much, and Ellie--in a shapeless and old-fashioned dress that hung on her lean frame like a sack--reacted to the monumental British formality by being rude in the best transatlantic manner. The final straw was the appearance of Ira’s over-eager girl-friend from the voyage out, a clear knock-out in a dress that must have cost a fortune and her eyes gleaming at the sight of Ira. They called a taxi early and, bundling the protesting Fagan into it, headed for the safety of the Chinese side of the river. There were no further invitations, especially when it was discovered they were working for the Chinese instead of the Chinese working for them.

From this point on, spares began to arrive in dribs and drabs on the bare marshy field at Linchu that seemed to be constantly swept by warm showers and high winds, to be followed at once--almost as though they could smell work--by a vast number of coolies, carpenters, laundrymen and labourers, each one with his assistant and his makee-learn boy, who trailed around after him learning pidgin English and the habits of Europeans for the time when he, too, would work for one.

None of them was much good and those who didn’t regard the aeroplanes as a rather elaborate joss, like the paper animals and motor cars and furniture they’d seen carried at weddings and funerals, considered them highly dangerous beasts that had to be approached with care. Within a week, one of them had blown himself up opening a can of motor spirit with a cadged cigarette in his mouth, and when they picked him up with singed eyebrows and hair and a startled look on his face, he promptly turned and bolted from the field, never to return.

They all seemed to get on with Ira, but Sammy, although he made them giggle and roll on the ground at the string of dubious Chinese words he’d begun to pick up, never missed a thing they did wrong and became known to them as a man whose eyes could see not only forward but also in the opposite direction through the back of his head.

Neither Ellie nor Fagan was a mechanic and was able to do no more than the simplest inspections, so that Ira managed to insist at least on a routine check on all the engines before they even contemplated moving north. Leaving the resentful Fagan and the coolies to concern themselves with sorting out spares in the tents Kowalski had produced, they set up a fitter’s bench on a flat stone and, with trestles flung together by a Chinese carpenter, got down to testing compression and examining ignition, valves and pumps, going through what ill-kept log books and inspection sheets Fagan possessed, and comparing invoices and lists of spares that came, with the lists of those that never came.

Fagan grumbled all the time, noisy, pathetic, resentful of Ira’s authority, yet curiously attractive with his lunatic humour and his Irish charm ‘White men don’t get themselves covered with grease and oil, me eager ould son,’ he pointed out gaily. ‘They get coolies to do that sort of work out here.’

That’s O.K.,’ Ira said equably, ‘if the coolies know how to service a Mercedes DIII--and I don’t think ours do.’

Fagan made one of his wild gestures. ‘Ah, Sweet Sufferin’ J., they can do it with someone standin’ over ‘em, can’t they?’ he insisted. ‘Sure, they soon get the hang. Monkey see. Monkey learn. We got a nigger to do it in South Africa. We never worried very much.’

Ira studied him for a moment. ‘I expect that’s why your motors always cut,’ he said gravely. ‘And why you killed yourselves with such monotonous regularity.’

Fagan studied him for a second, then he gave his mad laugh. ‘Ach, well,’ he shouted, ‘there’s nothin’ like a disaster or two for puttin’ a sparkle in the old eye, is there?’

He was never serious, rarely entirely sober and always difficult to work with. Among other things, he claimed to be a practising Catholic and, flourishing a rosary, demanded time off to go into Shanghai to worship.

Since he didn’t return until late and didn’t seem very sober when he did, Ira soon decided he used most of the time for drinking. He was devious, not very clever and unwilling to take orders, and dodged away most afternoons to sleep off his previous night’s whisky.

Eventually he failed to turn up at all and Ellie’s face grew more and more thunderous as the day progressed. The following morning Kowalski sent a message by his Chinese clerk in a taxi to the effect that he’d found Fagan drunk and required Ira’s assistance to get him home.

‘God damn him,’ Ira snorted in disgust as he threw down his tools. ‘I wouldn’t mind if all the bastard did was pinch the coolies to fetch him Hong Kong beer from Linchu--which is what he does most of the time.’

The taxi dropped him at the address in Shanghai that Kowalski had given him, but it turned out to be a brothel where there were plush red sofas, gilt mirrors and a sleazy Russian blonde, her skin dusted with white powder so that her flesh looked faintly greenish, who insisted Fagan owed her twenty dollars.

‘ ‘Twas the bullet I got at Balaclava,’ Fagan said as they fought to get him past the blonde and into the taxi. ‘It was jumpin’ in the wound and I needed a drink to take away the pain. Don’t let Ellie see me, bhoys. She’ll wipe the floor with me if she finds out.’

As they reached the hotel and appeared on the landing upstairs from the grilled lift the porters used, the furious, affronted Ellie was waiting for them in the doorway of her room, her eyes glittering, her mouth a tight line.

‘O.K.,’ she said between gritted teeth. ‘Go ahead, get him inside and I’ll crack his skull with the bed leg.’

The confrontation ended in a farcical scene on the landing with Fagan swaying in large trembling dignity in front of her, his face twisted into a sad clown’s grin that was meant to express understanding and love. Its only effect was to make her drag his gun out of his luggage and threaten to shoot him with it.

‘I ought to put a slug in you, you treacherous, stinking, whoring son-of-a-bitch,’ she snapped.

‘ ‘Twouldn’t be worth it,’ he said. ‘She had none of the unparalleled virtuosity at the game I’ve come to expect from you.’

His attempt at humour burst in his face as Ellie immediately exploded into a rage again, storming up and down the corridor, swinging the enormous Colt while he grinned his death’s head grin at her and the giggling waiters and the floor-boys and the liftman all looked on from the stairs..

The following morning, though Fagan didn’t appear, Ellie was waiting in the hotel lobby for the car that took them to the airfield, as though nothing had happened. Her face was expressionless and her lips tight, and she sat huddled in her old leather coat, obviously not intending to make or receive comments on what had happened. It had very early become clear that she and Fagan had never legalised their marriage before a priest or a registrar, but, though Fagan didn’t hesitate to throw out hints about their relationship, Ellie hugged it to herself as though she had had long since regretted it and had no intention of sharing her secret with anyone.

‘One thing,’ Sammy observed grudgingly. ‘She doesn’t let you down.’

The work proceeded slowly and laboriously, with Fagan always more a hindrance than a help, though Ellie, when she wasn’t occupied in handling him, took the indifferent conditions in her stride. Like everyone else, she was caught by Sammy’s infectious enthusiasm and was well used to eating al fresco meals in tents.

‘I’m the original outdoor girl,’ she pointed out. ‘I’ve been doing this since I left the cradle and I guess I’ve not lived in a house for more than a coupla months in my whole life.’