The Mercenaries

by John Harris

  ‘He isn’t tough, Ira,’ Sammy said with a surprising show of compassion. ‘You can see the nerves sticking out and vibrating like piano wires. But he likes killing. It does something to him. I’m glad I only blew up a cookhouse and a latrine. It stops you getting it into your system.’

  While Fagan was away, Ellie’s pupil, Cheng, a gentle-faced youth who looked no more than fifteen, flew his first solo. Ira stood by the farmhouse with Ellie, his hands in his pockets, smoking a cigarette, watching him, suffering every one of the tense moments the boy was living. Put your nose down before shutting off . . . the words he’d repeated again and again came automatically into his mind. . . . Keep the speed up.... Ease her back Back again.

  Nervously, Cheng made his shaky circuit and floated the old Farman down to the ground again and, as Ira ran across to him, he found him sitting in the wicker seat, breathless, his soft girl’s face dazed, his large dark eyes as joyous as Sammy’s had been.

  ‘Eyeh. Mister Ira,’ he grinned, beside himself with pride. ‘I fly!‘

  They crowded round him, pumping his hand, delighted with him, their first successful pupil. Lawn sent a coolie into Yaochow for Hong Kong beer to celebrate, and they were all in a group with the bottles in their hands when the Fokker returned. It was behind schedule and, though no one had said anything, they had all begun to look at their watches.

  Ira and Sammy were sitting on the trestle by the Albatros and after a while Ellie climbed on to the wing root, her arm round a bracing wire, the beer bottle in her hand, trying to look unconcerned. Beyond the field, the sun was still low on the horizon, shining past the Chang-an-Chieh with its frilly roofs and curving eaves.

  After a minute or two, Sammy climbed down from the trestle, wiping his hands on a piece of rag and reaching for his beer. He was followed by Ira and Ellie. Lawn joined them, then Cheng and Wang, and the six of them waited, none of them saying anything, smoking and pretending not to have noticed that Fagan was late. From behind the tents came the clang of a hammer on the morning air as one of the coolies tried to beat out a dented panel, and the whining sound of a two-stringed fiddle like a courting tomcat, and the shouts of the pupil pilots in some sort of game.

  After a while, with the increasing sun shining into their eyes, they heard the low-pitched hum of the B.M.W. and the tension disappeared at once.

  ‘There ‘e is,’ Lawn said, pointing. ‘Over the trees. Right of the Chang-an-Chieh. Low down.’

  The look of unconcern had vanished from Ellie’s face and Wang was crowing with pleasure, but Ira, with his longer experience, was still staring at the sky. The Fokker was flying one wing low on an uneven course past the pagoda and, with instincts honed sharp in France and not yet dimmed, he sensed that something was wrong.

  His tenseness seemed to transmit itself to Sammy. ‘Think he’s all right, Ira?’ he asked quietly.

  Ira said nothing, and he noticed that Lawn and Ellie and the others were alongside him now, staring at the sky again.

  The Fokker came in low over the field, and they saw at once that wires were trailing and fabric was flapping. The engine throttled back, one wing still low, Fagan making no attempt to turn the nose into wind, it came over their heads, settling fast, the engine emitting a peculiar whistle as the throttle was opened and shut.

  Ira tossed aside his empty beer bottle and began to walk after it, while Sammy ran for the old Peugeot which stood near the Albatros.

  The Fokker’s wheels banged heavily and they fully expected Fagan to open the throttle and take off again, but there was no response from the engine and the machine bounced. A wing touched but it recovered, the puff of dust it had raised disappearing astern. Again it bounced, then it began to settle once more, veering from side to side as though Fagan was having difficulty working the rudder bar.

  It came to a stop at the opposite end of the field, the propeller wash flattening the grass, and they knew at once that something was wrong because Fagan’s trademark was his spectacular turns and dangerous taxying. The engine died and the blur of the propeller vanished as the blades came to a stop, and Ira began to run. The Peugeot passed him, going fast, then Sammy clapped on the brakes and Ira fell inside as the engine roared again.

  Fagan was still sitting in the machine as they stopped alongside. He looked pale and sick underneath the grime from the guns.

  ‘All right?’ Ira asked.

  ‘Sure.’ The crazy laugh was cracked and feeble. ‘Help me out.’

  There seemed to be no blood on him and for a while Ira wondered if it was a recurrence of the malaria. Then, as they helped him to the ground, just as the others panted up, he swayed slightly, his face grey.

  Ira’s eyes had travelled over the machine. The fabric was torn in several places round the tail plane, along the wings and round the cockpit, and wires trailed on the grass from among the fluttering fabric.

  ‘For God’s sake ...’ he began. ‘They were waiting for me, I bet,’ Fagan whispered in apology to Ellie,

  ‘Did they hit you?’

  Fagan managed a twisted grin at Ira that changed into a spasm of agony. ‘God have mercy on me wicked soul,’ he panted. ‘Right up the bottom.’

  4

  Fagan died three days later with a bullet in the stomach, clutching his rosary and never able to say what had shot him.

  The hospital to which they took him was a big brick building with curved green roofs and a peeling, painted sign over the door, founded 1896, by the British missionary society. There seemed to be remarkably little equipment, however, and the Chinese doctor didn’t seem very capable. All he was able to do was prescribe laudanum and sprinkle powder on cotton wool and pack it over the wound, and the swift shallow breathing stopped in the middle of the third night in a shabby room that was full of bible texts and allegorical pictures of Faith, Hope and Charity.

  Whatever she felt, Ellie showed no outward sign of grief when they told her, and remained dry-eyed and frozen-faced, so that Ira found himself wondering just how much she’d loved Fagan, even if she’d ever loved him at all. He hadn’t been a particularly lovable man, but perhaps there’d been something between them that Ira had never been able to see.

  The Chinese merchant who owned the bungalow they’d rented refused to allow them to bring the body home because of the demons a dead foreign devil might attract and even tied a live rooster to the door to crow them away, and De Sa had to come to their assistance with a cellar at the back of his store. Fagan’s dying created as many problems as his living, and his death, like his life, was ridiculous and mismanaged.

  Even moving the body proved farcical. Kwei’s advance at Wukang had temporarily cut off the river route south and the students were blaming the resultant shortages on Tsu. The streets were full of them, marching in a long snake along the bund, carrying pigs’-bladder balloons and torches and chanting slogans, and every time Ira and Sammy tried to get the Crossley with the coffin in it near to De Sa’s store they found their way barred by screeching youngsters waving banners.

  For an hour and a half they manoeuvred the tender over the few hundred yards between the hospital and the store, even going round the city and retracing their route, until their nerves were on edge with the yelling and the presence of the body behind them.

  Ira stared sombrely at the coffin as they laid it on a couple of boxes in the corner of De Sa’s cellar, his mind full of the ridiculous incidents in Fagan’s misconducted life. It had been built by Wang in Chinese style and, painted white with the Chinese colour of mourning, it seemed gross and ugly in the corner of the basement, looking indecently new and smelling of fresh-sawn wood. It was hard to believe that the noisy, unpredictable Fagan was inside it, still and mutilated, never able again to create havoc and misery for the people who’d tried to understand him.

  The weather was hot and they had to bury him the following day, in a strip of ground near the Chinese cemetery at the back of a mission church run by a red-haired, wild-eyed Welsh Baptist minister. He wasn’t very willing to
conduct the service because Fagan had been a Catholic, but in the end he agreed on a modified form that seemed to please Ellie.

  They left Cheng in charge of the field and drove into the city in the Peugeot. It wasn’t easy. Tsu seemed to be losing control of Tsosiehn as he had of Hwai-Yang, and the students were doing as they pleased. There were Chiang flags about everywhere and a few thick columns of smoke where they had set fire to buildings belonging to Tsu’s supporters.

  The Rev. Alwyn Rees was waiting for them at the entrance to his little stone church, which was a mixture of Welsh Baptist and Chinese stylised. The graves behind it carried Welsh and Chinese names, from that of the Rev. Daffydd Gruffydd, who had died as minister in 1894, to that of Lee Si-Chen, the child of one of the latest converts who had been drowned in the river when a sampan had been run down by a junk the week before.

  De Sa turned up in his clattering little Model-T, olive-complexioned and bitter about the students. There was mud on his clothes and the back of his car was daubed with ‘Go Home, Foreign Devil!‘ He made no reference to it, however, commenting only, ‘I am a Catholic too, you understand. Perhaps I can keep him company.’

  The body arrived on the back of a mule cart surrounded by flowers, but the mules took fright at the fireworks down the street and were difficult to control, and as they turned into the cemetery one of them began to buck and the wheel of the cart slid over the edge of a drainage ditch so that the coffin almost slipped off. In the Chinese cemetery, they could see burial mounds with their paper streamers fluttering in the wind to keep away the evil spirits, and two or three blankfaced peasants in blue cotton, watching with a Taoist priest in a mitre hat and carrying a horse-hair fly-swat and prayer scroll, their heads constantly turning towards the noise of the students along the street.

  ‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy . . .’ the Rev. Alwyn Rees had a harsh Welsh voice that grated on the nerves, especially as he had to raise it to make himself heard above the din in the city, and Ellie suddenly and unexpectedly began to cry. She had been so in command of herself ever since Fagan had landed, it came as a shock, and Ira moved forward and put his arm round her thin shoulders as they moved in weak sobs that were heartbreaking after her control.

  As the high-pitched voice droned on, curiously lacking in feeling or emotion, it struck him as odd that Fagan whose Catholicism was probably one of the few firm things about him should be laid to rest by a Goanese Catholic; a Welsh Baptist; an American protestant; a Jew; Lawn, a Wesleyan Methodist; himself, a non-practising member of the Church of England; Mei-Mei, whose background, origin and religion was still defeating all Sammy’s halting attempts to find out; and by a group of Chinese converts, pagans, and Taoist pupil-pilots wearing white scarves for mourning.

  The burial seemed hurried, as though Rees was anxious to be rid of them and get to safety from the mob, and Ira remembered something that Fagan had once said. There were no reports to fill in, in this ridiculous little war in China. There was no valedictory volley over the grave either, only a hurried chanting from Rees and muttered sympathy from the mourners.

  When it was over, De Sa and Mei-Mei escorted a curiously diminished Ellie to his car and drove her home. Ira and Sammy stood watching them silently. Though neither of them had ever particularly liked Fagan, the first loss in their little group had touched them deeply.

  ‘I think she must have loved the old nailer, Ira,’ Sammy said wonderingly. ‘I’d never have believed it, would you?’ Ira shook his head, caught by guilt and wondering if he’d let Fagan go on trying too long. ‘Perhaps I ought to have stopped him,’ he said. ‘I thought of doing so.’

  Sammy shrugged. ‘You’d never have managed it,’ he said. ‘He’d have felt you didn’t trust him. He’d probably have shot himself or something in shame. He was potty enough.’

  Ira sighed. ‘Somehow,’ he said slowly, ‘I had a feeling Ellie wanted to see him pull it off. Perhaps she wanted him to make enough money for them to go home.’ He shrugged. ‘Or perhaps she just wanted the poor bastard to prove he was good at something. I don’t know.’

  Sammy nodded and glanced at the grave, then he bent and tossed a handful of soil on to the coffin. Think we ought to put up a cross or something?’ he asked. ‘We could get Wang to fix something.’

  Ira nodded. ‘We’ll get that propeller he smashed and put that up. He’d like that.’

  ‘What shall we put on it?’

  ‘His name for a start.’

  Sammy looked blank. ‘What was it?’

  ‘Something long and Irish. Padraic O’Faolain Fenoughty Fagan, I think. Something good and traditional. Ellie’ll tell us.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Call him “captain”. He was one in Tsu’s army. Better put a medal or two on, as well.’

  ‘Did he have any?’

  ‘I don’t think so, but it’d please him.’

  The yelling down the road rose in volume and a few coolies ran past to join the crowd, their voices high-pitched and angry. Sammy stared at them for a moment, then his eyes fell on the open grave again.

  ‘It’ll look bloody funny,’ he said. ‘Just imagine some bloke coming along fifty years from now and finding a grave here right in the middle of China, with a busted propeller and Captain Padraic O’Faolain Fenoughty Fagan, D.S.O., M.C., Croix de Guerre, et cetera written all over it.’

  Ira shrugged, listening to the crowd among the shabby houses of matshed and corrugated iron. ‘Perhaps fifty years from now no one’ll come here but Chinese,’ he said.

  By the time they left, the mob was breaking windows and a few Tsu soldiers had begun to appear, as though Tsu had stirred himself at last to try to regain control. They saw the Kuomintang symbols being scrubbed off the walls and, as they turned on to the bund, a group of shabby infantrymen ran up with an ancient and rusty machine gun and set it on a tripod in front of the mob surging out of the side streets like rivulets of water flowing together to make a flood.

  ‘That’ll teach ‘em not to swear in church,’ Sammy grinned.

  The mob had come to a stop, still yelling but with its flags and placards drooping as they saw the soldiers squatting down, and the humour suddenly went from Sammy’s face as he saw a sergeant work the cocking handle.

  ‘Lor’, Ira,’ he said, unbelieving, ‘I think the bastards are going to shoot.’

  Even as he spoke, the machine gun clacked, jumping on the tripod, and as the banners and the placards began to waver and fall the screeching stopped. Almost immediately, the ancient gun jammed and the soldiers bent over it, cursing, but the crowd had disappeared abruptly, except for half a dozen flattened bundles in the road, which writhed and twitched in agony. It was all over so quickly it was hard to believe it had happened.

  An officer walked forward with a revolver and as the shots roared and the writhing stopped, Sammy stared at the scene with shocked, bitter eyes.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘that’ll help Tsu when the day of reckoning comes.’

  The city was brooding and silent by the time they made their way home. There were a few aimless groups of students still about, but the soldiers moved them on every time they bunched together, whacking them in the kidneys with their gun butts and jabbing with their bayonet points. The smell of rebellion was in the air, with the acrid stink of smoke, just as it had been at Hwai-Yang.

  Mei-Mei greeted them with a grave face as they arrived. Sammy glanced at Ira and, touching her hand, gave her a little push so that she moved ahead of him towards her room.

  Ira found Ellie lying on her bed. She’d stopped crying and was smoking, her hand hanging loosely on the covers. She looked up as he appeared, her eyes puffed and red, then she swung her feet to the floor and crushed her cigarette into an ashtray Sammy had made her from a piston.

  She managed a twisted smile that seemed to indicate suffering, bewilderment and uncertainty all at the same time. Whatever Fagan had meant to her, their lives had been involved enough together for her to be sho
cked by his death. ‘What now?’ she asked. ‘Where do we go from here?’

  He offered her another cigarette and lit one himself. The defeated look in her eyes suddenly reminded him of what Sammy had said when he had first met them. ‘They’ve got the look of doom on ‘em, those two,’ he had insisted. ‘They’ll finish us between ‘em.’

  He thrust the thought aside and, fishing in his pocket, produced the letter the Chinese doctor had written on his instructions.

  ‘Death certificate, Ellie,’ he said, placing it beside her hand. The best thing you can do is take the next steamer down to Shanghai and get the insurance paid over. I don’t suppose, with Eddie looking after it, there’ll be any trouble.’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  He studied her for a second. With Fagan dead, he couldn’t see any reason for her to stay in Tsosiehn. The city had little to recommend it, especially now, and he knew she’d never liked it.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said.

  ‘I guess so.’

  She seemed frozen inside and it wasn’t easy talking to her.

  ‘Mei-Mei’ll help you get your stuff together,’ he went on. ‘And one of us will drive you to the steamer. Get Eddie to buy you a ticket home.’

  She lifted her eyes. ‘Home? Ira, my brother was killed in the war. My dad broke his neck and my mother married again. I don’t even know where she is. Where is home, for God’s sake, apart from here?’

  Ira shifted uncomfortably. ‘Well, just get the hell out of it, Ellie,’ he said.

  She looked up at him. ‘Suppose I don’t want to,’ she said.

  ‘Why in God’s name not?’

  She shrugged. ‘I’ve gotten used to this,’ she said. ‘It started with Ches in 1919. Even before. It’s always been hotels, other people’s houses, and tents in some lousy little joint miles from nowhere. What would I do?’