Scoundrels

by Victor Cornwall

  The referee was the U.S. Colonel Gonerill. He nodded, sombre-faced at Cornwall and I. Normally there was a seam of ridiculousness that ran through the beetle fights. We all knew how daft this pursuit was, but suddenly this was life or death, and not just for the beetles.

  Gonerill called “Fight!” Hercule scuttled out into the dohyō full of evil intent. He glistened blackly, from all the olive oil on his carapace. His horns looked like they’d been sharpened, and knowing Mad Jack I suspected they had been. Waa stood timidly, perhaps half the size of his opponent. Hercule charged across the entire diameter of the dohyō like a tiny bull, but at the last moment Waa threw himself to the left, a miniscule matador skidding on the baize surface. Hercule let out a tiny trumpet of rage, and pawed the ground with his iridescent hooves.

  I could see what Waa was going to do. He was going to tire Hercule out. He was going to grind him down, tear out his pronotum, and eat it right in front of him.

  Hercule charged again, this time Waa skidded right, and then doubled back, cutting a fine line across Hercule’s path. This nimble challenger confused Hercule. He didn’t know where to aim his horns, and so trundled on mindlessly to the edge of the dohyō. Mad Jack thumped the table with rage, and was rebuked sharply by Colonel Gonerill.

  Shaking himself, Hercule turned around. Confusingly, Waa was right in front of him. Waa leapt high into the air, folding back his wing cases with lightning speed. His wings came out, and he powered straight down onto Hercule’s back, nearly puncturing his scutellum. The crowd had never seen anything like this tactic before. Mad Jack looked white-faced and tense, while General Ito sat impassively, slugging whisky shots.

  Now Hercule was trying to shake the crazed challenger off, but Waa was beginning to open up his back like a tin opener does a can of beans. He revealed a secret weapon that even the Major and I hadn’t seen before. His back legs were tensed into vicious serrations and he used them as hacksaws to slice through Hercule’s abdominal casing. He stuck two more legs into the holes, to enlarge them into stirrups. He was riding Hercule as a cowboy rides a wild mustang.

  Hercule was bucking and writhing, trying to shake him off. Waa held on tight though, a mountaineer on a shaking black cliff face. Suddenly Hercule threw himself onto his own back to try to crush Waa, and my heart was in my mouth, for a beetle on its back is as vulnerable as an upturned tortoise.

  But not Waa. He flipped himself over, and landed on his two rear legs, standing up like a proper little pugilist. As Hercule charged him again he dropped to the floor and used his left antler to get underneath Hercule’s body. Hercule was boosted up into the air and flipped like a derailed train. Now it was Hercule whose soft underbelly was exposed. He lay, helpless, waiting for Waa to deliver the killer blow deep into his pulsating metasternum.

  The crowd was going berserk at the most astonishing beetle fight anyone had ever seen. No grappling, no circling, none of the nonsense that slows a fight down. This had been pure beetle-on-beetle action. We’d be talking about this to our grandchildren. I glanced at Victor who had a look of pure joy on his face. Once Waa stabbed Hercule in his underside we were free men.

  Waa approached the giant beetle, slowly, like an executioner. I remember thinking what an excellent sense of the dramatic he had, milking the crowd for all they were worth and squeezing every last drop of tension out of this fight. “Finish him!” I screamed.

  “Kill him!” called Cornwall triumphantly.

  A hammy fist slammed down onto Waa, who was instantly obliterated into a light green sludge. “Hercule is the winner!” said General Ito, wiping his hand on Captain Asahi’s jacket. “Guards, take the prisoners to the cell block, after they have paid me my $300,000.”

  The Following morning

  The Major and I sat, dejected beyond belief, in the cell reserved for condemned men. We’d been given a choice of chicken or fish; beheading or firing squad. Cornwall had decided on chicken and beheading. I had decided on fish as long as it wasn’t mahi tuna, and beheading also.

  It had been a big, tough war, but we were big, tough men. Sitting on the sandy floor, with my back against the rough wooden posts of the cell, I gave a rueful smile and made a silent apology to all the women I would have slept with, were I not about to have my head sliced off. Those poor, poor things, several hundred of them, would be left with an aching feeling of sexual jamais-vu. As I considered all those shuddering orgasms I wouldn’t be delivering to the war widows of England, my eyes went misty.

  And then there were the undertakings for Scoundrels that I wouldn’t be undertaking. All those thorny diplomatic tangles they’d give to the next chaps, rather than me. That stuck in the craw, as I was bloody good at them, even at such a tender age. Never again would I see Lunk dump down one of his cerise folders on the table of the Gaye Bar or the Long Room, sending me off to kidnap a Mayor or steal a microfiche. A real pity.

  And then there was Nimbu. I thought of Bernard-Bernard, humming some filthy Gallic ditty as he prepared a brace of saltmarsh lamb chops with minted potatoes, and a soufflé of garden peas. I thought of Cacahuete polishing the dark wood of my desk with beeswax from my apiary, and helping himself to a Cohiba for his trouble. I thought of the view from the mullioned windows of my father’s library, and the sweep of the lawns down to the orchard and trout stream. I thought of my insensible brother, Eustace, so shattered by the loss of our parents. How would he cope with losing me, too? I thought of little Angry Lightning, the jet-black colt who was showing such promise when I’d last been down at the yard. I wondered if I might have shared all this with a wife one day. It was not to be. Instead I would shortly be hearing the swish of a samurai blade, and then nothing. What a way to go for an Englishman, or any man – kneeling in the dirt of a Japanese prison camp. I found some solace though. I had no regrets about the things I’d done, only the things I hadn’t.

  Silently I stretched out my arm. My friend, Major Victor Cornwall took it. He looked into my eyes and smiled at me. His grip was firm, and his eyes steady. He was just about to say something. I’ve always wondered what it was, but just then the cell door burst open and Captain Obi rushed in, looking like he’d just seen all the ghosts of his ancestors at once. “Wushwomb,” he yelled, pointing behind him, “Wushwomb!”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Cornwall.

  And then a terrible roaring noise, which seemed to suck all the air from our cell. The noise was simultaneously shriekingly high and so low as to judder the fillings in my back teeth. I was filled with a sickening despair in the pit of my stomach. Until I realised that this horrific event, in which hell was truly unleashed on earth, would work out rather well for Cornwall and me.

  We barged past the stricken Obi, and ran outside into the sunlight. Everyone, prisoners and guards alike, was staring at the horizon to the north. A colossal dust cloud in the shape of a mushroom was steadily climbing the sky.

  “Bloody hell Trevelyan, look at that. You don’t think it’s…?”

  “I do. They’ve only gone and done it… this is it Cornwall. Look lively, it’s now or never.” I was right. It was our only chance, and it was thanks to Scoundrels Club that we recognised it so quickly. At the last Scoundrels’ All Points meeting before our ill-fated mission to the British Museum, Lunk had shown some blueprints of a new and terrible weapon he’d had photographed in a Mojave Desert laboratory. The Yanks were thinking of deploying it to decisively end the war: a chain reaction of atoms, harnessed into a bomb. Well they’d clearly been bloody busy over the last eighteen months, as the thing was already a mile high. We knew this was a seminal moment. As we gaped at the billowing cloud, we saw how Tokyo would fall, and the army would follow, and the camps would become killing grounds.

  The guards were transfixed as the nuclear cloud consumed the north sky. So it was a simple thing to knock them all out, lock them in our cell and take all four of their rifles, two katanas, and a pair of uniforms
, as well as all of their knapsacks and rations. Disguised, with hats pulled down low, we hotfooted it to the front gate.

  It was bedlam. Guards, officers and prisoners alike were shouting and fighting with each other. It felt a lot like Winstowe on the last day of the summer term, except with more summary executions. In fact, everyone seemed to be ordering somebody to execute somebody else. The gates of Wan Booli had been thrown open in the confusion, and nobody really knew anything. Cornwall and I chose our moment wisely, and bustled through the gates, pushing prisoners and enlisted men aside, jabbing with our short bayonets and shouting wildly. Outside the camp, rings of refugees, desperate for food, surrounded us. Nearly the whole of Japan was starving by this time. We simply disappeared into the teeming village of makeshift tents and tinpot shacks.

  In the next days tens of thousands of unlucky prisoners were slaughtered by the Japanese, and tens of thousands of Japanese were slaughtered by the invading Chinese. In turn, tens of thousands of prisoners rebelled, and slaughtered their captors. It was a uniquely unpleasant place to be.

  So we decided to walk home.

  __________

  We walked north into China, and then west through Burma, Bangladesh and into India. From India, we got across Baluchistan, Iran, Iraq and after some needless detouring, Turkey. Once we were in Europe things became simpler. Partly because we knew the geography, and partly as we knew a little of the lingo. The walk took about a year and a half. The worst part was travelling across France, the only place where it was impossible to find a decent cup of tea.

  Suffice to say, it was a hell of a stroll, across the thick end of three continents. We should have only covered two, leaving Africa right out of it, but Cornwall’s miserable orienteering sent us left at the Lebanon into Egypt, instead of right. We averaged just over ten miles a day, which is not as weak as it seems, factoring in bandits, starvation, loss of shoes, loss of a fetid kidney, Cornwall being ordained as a Zoroastrian priest, the shits, skirmishes with tigers, black bears and an ocelot. And many a tumble with a girl in a hayloft.

  We were half a mile from the Club when, looking like a pair of tinkers in our rags and stinking like Roquefort, who should we bump into but Jefferson, stepping out of his Daimler at Aldwych.

  “Bloody hell,” he exclaimed, adjusting his monocle. “You’ve seen better days, haven’t you? I was going to stretch the old legs through Covent Garden on my way to the Club, but perhaps we should drive it, eh?”

  We gratefully accepted Jefferson’s offer of a lift, and moments later pulled up at the great black doors, which I thought I’d never see again.

  Unfortunately, arriving by Daimler rather dampened our tale when we got to the Club, and nobody seemed prepared to believe we’d walked even from Hyde Park, let alone Japan.

  __________

  And what of our Pine Cone Club profits? What about the half million quid, and the gold? How did we walk away from all that loot? Well, we thought we’d lost a few quid that day, it’s true, but not all of it, by any stretch. In the latter months of our tenure as owners of the Pine Cone, we’d squirrelled away a fair portion in the Bank of Nagasaki, thanks to a guard who’d opened up an account in the name Cornwelyan Enterprises, in return for all the chips he could gamble. Opening an account seemed a bit smarter than just burying it in the dirt. We did a bit of that too of course, and there must still be a fair bit of gold lying around the site, but neither Cornwall nor I ever fancied returning to dig it up.

  As we tramped across Asia we’d speculated glumly that we’d never see a penny of the banked money again, but to our surprise the Bank of Nagasaki got back on its feet in ‘51, and insisted on settling with us. At Wan Booli, we’d found the Japanese sense of honour a serious pain to deal with, but this time it paid off. Out of nowhere, our office in New Bond St received a cheque for nearly two million pounds, and while it has never been our practice to broadcast a good result in business, we did take the entire Club on a month-long bender to Lesbos, which really lived up to its reputation. And we bought a yacht. Each. I named my vessel Grimshaw, and Cornwall called his Morningdew.

  Business-wise, Cornwall and I had already raised and re-raised capital on the original Nagasaki bank receipt. We’d made a second fortune, and tried many times to separate our assets so we could walk away from each other. Unfortunately, the original deal notes were written in several languages and violated tax treaties in the UK and Japan. This meant we could never separate the money without reducing it by at least two hundred and forty percent. After tax, import duties, bank fees and professional fees, disentangling our business dealings from the original casino earnings would have rendered us both instantly penniless, and thrown us well into the red, potentially plucking Nimbu Towers, and Bluebell Manor from us. Every single lawyer, accountant and taxman recommended the same thing: stick together.

  From this inauspicious circumstance grew a company that we would own jointly for the next seventy years: Cornwelyan Enterprises. We found we had a knack for it. I suppose if you can run a casino in the middle of a Japanese P.O.W. camp, you can turn your hand to most things. Cornwelyan’s growth kept us both in clover, despite Cornwall’s appalling spending habits. I couldn’t have wished for a more canny business partner. But then again, I didn’t wish for a business partner at all.

  So there you have it, I think I’ve done us justice with this one. I am a little concerned about going into any kind of detail about the set-up and workings of Cornwelyan, in case the swine at Her Majesty’s Revenue Collections can read words as well as numbers. If they look too hard at our post-war years, we’ll both be back under Waterloo Bridge before you can say boo.

  All our readers need to know is that we were inextricably bound together in business until, well, until we suddenly didn’t have a business any more. It was probably the only positive thing to come out of the Hansclapp affair.

  Anyway, I am bloody glad to put these Wan Booli chapters to bed. One day perhaps I’ll return to these memories and tell the story of our long walk home, but I think that one will keep, don’t you?

  Yours sincerely,

  Major Arthur St. John Trevelyan

  Hellcat Manor

  Great Trundleford

  Devon

  21st November, 2016

  Dear Major,

  Thank you for your latest account. I remember those as heady days despite our incarceration. Being forced together in that hellhole may have been the secret of our success, but don’t assume that I wanted you as a partner either.

  You were a reasonably competent company director but a dreary and unimaginative entrepreneur because you were too risk averse, whereas I was the sort of innovator who would grab the bull by the horns and the bollocks before wrestling it to the ground and turning it into prime rib and luxury leather handbags. You always construed that as recklessness, but when I saw an opportunity I went for it. It is the same for me in life, in love and in business.

  And it’s why I stepped up to the plate when the word Everest first started being whispered around the club.

  Was the expedition a risk? Yes. Was it a mistake? Perhaps. But that’s the way I was in those days: all or nothing.

  __________

  CHAPTER 18

  An Attempt on Everest

  Scoundrels Club, October 1947

  The war was finally over. Jerry had been sent packing with his tail between his legs and I was free to get on with the rest of my life. Once the sweet afterglow of the Allied victory had faded, the street parties had died down and the bunting put away I settled into an uneventful existence.

  Life revolved around the club – meeting for the morning papers at nine followed by pre-prandials in the Gaye Bar, a light lunch then a nap in the Fern Room before dealing with business affairs. Many of the members had tremendous war stories that were constantly being embellished and reworked upon until they passed into club legend.

&nbs
p; Maurice Johncocktosen, for instance, had run a place in Andorra specialising in teaching French and Spanish ladies how to make senior Nazis fall in love, and how to extract their secrets from the pillow. His intelligence network had cracked several enemy operations, and more than one traitor had ended up at the bottom of Lake Tristaina at his hand. I noticed in the sauna one afternoon that he had hundreds of tiny curved scars all over his back, forming deep welts. I assumed he’d been tortured by some fascist or other and had merely forgotten to mention it, but no. He explained that they were merely “fingernails in the throes of ecstasy.” He was terribly lax with the old rubber johnnies though, and it emerged that he’d sired thirty-one children. All his French children were named Jean or Jeanette, and his Spanish ones Juan or Juanita. Daddy Anglais, as he was known, boasted that he had never missed a birthday and paid the school fees of every single one of them, from age four to eighteen, before setting each one of them up in business.

  Who else had had a good war? Why Massingberd of course. He had managed to get himself a commission as a Lieutenant Colonel. Thus he was senior enough to immediately post himself to a liaison role in the Galapagos Islands, where he oversaw the region from a castle he constructed from dynamited coral reef. The bhang was very good over there, and he didn’t realise that the war had ended until late 1946, by which time he had singlehandedly hunted the Scalloped Hammerhead Turtle to extinction.

  In late 1941, Mahatma Blaze had returned to his childhood home of Kerala. There was a bit of a murmur initially, as some said he’d scuttled off to avoid the war. Not so. Using a combination of caste ties and bribery he raised a battalion of twelve thousand fighting men. He had them build a fleet of destroyers to his own design, and by 1942 was sailing them up the Red Sea and into the Gulf of Suez, where he’d assisted Sir Richard O’Connor’s attack on the Italian Tenth army at Beda Fomm. He took over eight thousand Italians prisoner but did not have the heart to slaughter them. Instead he sailed them back to Kerala and made them work in his chipboard factories for the rest of the war. Many of them remain, and curried bolognese is now a regional delicacy.