by Desmond Cory
Hig Requiem
Desmond Cory
Contents
Author - Critical Acclaim
On Johnny Fedora
Also by Desmond Cory
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Also by Desmond Cory
A gift for you
Author - Critical Acclaim
"Readers who like their thrillers to complement their intelligence must on no account miss Mr. Cory."
The Times
"Mr. Cory may well turn out to be a British Raymond Chandler."
Birmingham Post
"A remarkable literate suspense story. Certainly Cory's name will be one to reckon with after this."
The Book Buyer’s Guide
"Cory is remarkably adept at depicting both the introspection and action, convincing the reader that the two elements of the plot are equally important."
The Mystery Fancier
"Desmond Cory is a writer of thrillers who really can write. He combines verve and intelligence with genuine skill in the use of words."
Sheffield Telegraph
"Desmond Cory continues to impress. His novels are as good as when they were first released. It's just a matter of time before they are made into a major TV series.”
Top 500 Amazon Book Reviewer
"Desmond Cory's writing is exceptional, almost to the point that I thought he was Ian Fleming's reincarnation. Cory knows how to build and pump up one's anticipation with the twists and turns in the story. The suspense literally killed me with every bated breath. The way Johnny eclipses James Bond is just as outstanding and gripping. I won't be surprised if this book is already considered a classic.”
The Coffeeholic Bookworm
On Johnny Fedora
"Johnny Fedora is the 'thinking man's James Bond' who spends his life 'dealing with the cold-bloodiest bastards on this earth."
Books and Bookmen
"Desmond Cory seems to me to accomplish precisely what Fleming was aiming at. This is a sexy, colourful, glamorous story, written with finesse, economy, humour, and full and inventive plotting."
New York Times
“Move over Jason Bourne, James Bond….Johnny Fedora is the classic secret agent we crave to have back. Gone are the silly gadgets, ridiculous stunts, and far fetched stories. This harps back to the Mad Men period of the 1950s, when agents just used their wits and the occasional volley of gun-shots”
Amazon Reviewer
Also by Desmond Cory
This is the sixth novel in the Johnny Fedora series.
Previous titles in the series:
Secret Ministry
This Traitor, Death
Dead Man Falling
Intrigue
Height of Day
High Requiem
www.johnnyfedora.com
www.desmondcory.com
1
“I killed a man,” said O’Brien distinctly, “back in Nairobi.”
O’Brien was very big. Six foot three easily, weighing about fourteen stone. He had red hair and a chin like a door-knocker. And he had had plenty to drink. Fedora, who sat on the other side of the rickety wooden table, was four inches shorter and a good three stone lighter; the fact that he, too, had had plenty to drink he considered immaterial … O’Brien’s statement, coming as it did on the tail of five minutes of heavy breathing, invited no obvious riposte; nor did the circumstances conduce to the invention of telling repartee.
“You must tell me all about it,” said Fedora cosily.
O’Brien leaned forward, imperilling the table with a huge and sinewy elbow. “Now listen. I like you, what’s-your-name.”
“Fedora. Call me Johnny.”
O’Brien nodded pontifically. “That’s right. Call you Johnny. Well, I killed a man back in Kenya. You know that? You know that, hey?”
Fedora made an interested noise.
“Broke his neck. Snap. Like that. And left him there in the ditch. Very good thing, too, because between you and me he was a nasty piece of work; very nasty.”
“I see.”
“A delicate situation.”
“Yes, very.”
“So if anything untoward should occur,” said O’Brien, surveying his glass lugubriously, “if there should be any question of Altercation with the Police, and if I should depart suddenly and unexpectedly into the African night … then you’re in charge, old man. The old bus reverts to you. Just bash on regardless to Tripoli, and I’ll catch up with you there. A fine place, Tripoli.”
“You didn’t say anything about all this before,” Johnny pointed out. He was feeling somewhat perturbed.
“Naturally not. Had to be sure you were the right sort. Some aren’t, of course. And anyway, it didn’t seem to matter a lot until we were on British territory.” O’Brien raised his glass, tilted it. A small driblet escaped his mouth and coursed down the side of his chin. “Well, hell,” said Johnny. “We’ve been on British territory for nearly two days.”
“Theoretically, yes. But this area we’re in now is patrolled. Remember that little wadi we crossed back at the head of the valley? Leads up to an outpost; seen it a hundred times from the air. Looks much the same from ground level, actually.”
The barman materialised surprisingly beside the table, ghost-like in grey-white tarboosh and sandals. Beads of sweat gleamed dully on his dark forehead. He removed the empty bottle from Fedora’s elbow and as silently replaced it with another; Johnny regarded it dubiously. He was not very fond of araq.
“Let’s hope we don’t run into any policemen, then.”
“I don’t see why we should,” said O’Brien. “There shouldn’t be any trouble that we can’t handle between here and the coast. All the same - remember what I said - if I disappear suddenly, then you’ll know what’s happened. And the van’s all yours.”
Johnny gave him an exasperated glance. “I doubt if I could get that damned contraption more than a mile without it conking out; you’re about the only man in Africa who can really make it tick. If I tried to—”
“Then sell it. Sell it for scrap-iron. And buy yourself an air-line ticket. By God,” said O’Brien explosively, “even with my crazy old ship I’d have been in Cairo twenty-four days ago, and rolling about in the fleshpots. That’s the way to travel.”
“No dust,” agreed Johnny appreciatively.
“No dust. Christ! No nothing. Just sitting happily, bumming along with an engine on either side of you … That’s the way, the only way to travel.” O’Brien raised his face to the welkin, and instantly lapsed into a reverie, rather reminiscent of Mr. Toad’s. He continued to mutter further eulogistic phrases under his breath, but they were all inaudible. Johnny, who had heard a great deal of this sort of thing recently, sat back in his chair and began to fan himself with his hat.
Overhead, through great gaps in the palm-leaf roof, giant stars were prickling in the sky. Waves of heat, stored up during the day, came throbbing through the air from the wilderness of rock outside, making Johnny’s head pulse to the painful slowness of their rhythm. Somewhere at the back of the hut a radio was playing very softly something from Porgy and Bess; the two boys behind the counter of planks were dim shadows in the rusty light of the oil-lamps. In the shadow of the bar a mangy dog slept a profound sleep. Johnny registered all this without real
ly noticing it; it was a scene to which he had grown wearisomely accustomed.
He trickled a little more liquid into his glass, and looked again towards O’Brien, whose head had now sunk forward on to his chest. Not sleeping, though; but thinking. That was what happened all the time with O’Brien; his waking life was a series of five-minute conversational bursts, punctuated by long spells of silent reflection. Johnny wondered whether he really thought about anything, or whether he merely retired to some strange and tranquil airman’s world half-way between the earth and the stratosphere. “O’Brien,” he said.
There was no reply.
Johnny leaned forward to take a pull from his glass; finding himself more cramped than he had realised, he stood up and looked about him. Finally he put his glass on the table and walked over to the door of the bar.
The van looked like some vague prehistoric animal crouched in the swimming shadows of a palm-tree. A blanket of darker shadow was spread out beneath it; to either side were the shacks, the adobe walls of the village. There is always silence in the Sahara night; but sometimes at the hub of the turning wheel of soundlessness there is something heavier, something profounder, than silence. Tonight that indefinable something seemed to hang beneath the high palm-leaves, to cloak the van in stillness. Johnny walked forward and found, as always, that the point when reached was the same as anywhere else. He placed one hand on the battered, wrenched-about mudguard and was, satisfyingly, sick.
This did not occupy him for long. Nevertheless, when he looked up O’Brien was there; standing beside him and above him, a huge figure silhouetted against the star-glowing night.
“Feel better now, do you?”
“I feel fine,” said Johnny truthfully.
“That’s good. Filthy stuff, araq. Could never hold it for long myself; not at first. Heaven only knows what they put into it.”
Johnny stepped back, resting his spine against the calloused trunk of the palm. “Got a cigarette?”
“Yes. Here you are. Thinking about turning in?”
“Thinking about it, yes.”
“We might as well.” A match flared, cupped in those enormous hands as though in a fireplace. “And get away to an early start tomorrow. Put in two or three hours at the wheel before dawn; that’s the ticket.”
“Yes,” said Johnny, inhaling smoke. “That’s always the ticket.”
It was true that O’Brien’s journey from Kenya had taken him a long time. It was equally true that few other men could have made that journey at all; for his van was a relic, a complete antiquity, a patched-up collection of heterogeneous metal parts that somehow, under the hand of a genius, could be persuaded grumblingly and awkwardly to function. It coughed and it choked and it gurgled; every part of its chassis squeaked and creaked interminably; its engine - or the rusty assortment of miscellaneous scrap-metal tangled under the bonnet - threatened constantly to give up the ghost and, on an average of twice a day, did so. Yet somehow O’Brien had kept the monster rolling, had kept it grinding steadily onwards over the dusty rutted tracks of North-East Africa, onwards through conditions that an ordinary car and an ordinary driver could never have endured. But there are some men who are born to handle machinery, to coax it and bully it and tease it and force it into performing virtual miracles, who feel the throb of a piston as they feel the throb of their own pulses and who can diagnose instantly and infallibly the hesitation of the smallest cogwheel … Well, O’Brien was one of these. When he drove, the life of the machine seemed to enter into him; in return, he lent to it something of his own indomitable personality, making it sentient, more than inanimate. The van under which he and Johnny slept, for all its dilapidation, was waiting for the morning with its chin held high in the air.
Five days earlier, when he had first met with O’Brien, Johnny had not believed that they would ever reach Tripoli. Not with that van, anyway. He had hoped at best for a ride to the nearest village, bringing the nearest railway station a couple of days’ march nearer; also for entertaining company, to alleviate for a spell the boredom of his long trek north from the Congo. Anyway, he was flat broke and had nothing to lose, even from a character as disreputable in outward appearance as O’Brien. And yet, in fact, the van had gone on and on and on; ninety miles that first day, a hundred and sixty the second; rarely at more than twenty miles an hour, never without that ceaseless cacophony of complaining metal parts; yet remorselessly, patiently, inevitably. And in Johnny’s mind, the consideration had become a certainty that one day - this week, next week, next month, but some day - O’Brien’s van would eventually limp triumphantly into Tripoli.
So he had stayed on.
It was not proving a particularly pleasant journey. O’Brien drove only in the early morning and in the evening, when conditions were at their best; but even then the heat of the eastern Sahara was always about them, heavy as a blanket, lethargic as opium smoke. Johnny sweated and swore to himself, jolted from side to side by the lurching van, while the dust rose from the road in clouds and stuck to his clothes, to his damp face, entered his eyes and his nose and his mouth. The uncertain light of the headlamps, weak and blinking, probed the darkness ahead, where the ruts leaped up as great abysses in the silvery-yellow of the sand. Then swiftly, at a bound, the sun would rise, shooting a great smoking arrow across the wastes towards them; in an hour’s time the metal bodywork would be too hot to touch, and fresh perspiration would trace sticky, itching rivulets through the fine sand that coated their skins. In the evening it was best; when the rocks of the desert turned gold and grey and purple in the light of the lowering sun; then, after sunset, when the northern sky seemed to swell and contract to the mighty pulsation of the stars.
But now it was morning again; morning in a village like any other. The position of the weakening stars showed that two hours lacked to sunrise; the low-roofed huts of the village seemed to shift uneasily and to move away at the first rough-throated roar of the motor. O’Brien, his eyes still sleepy but his face a mask of intentness, was stooped over the steering-wheel, his hands moving smoothly over what remained of the dashboard, testing, approving, rejecting; Johnny sat back in the uncomfortable bucket-seat as the van began to ease itself splutteringly forward. “Contact,” said O’Brien, half to himself.
“Off we go,” agreed Johnny companionably.
The usual chorus of barking dogs marked their exit from the village; no one left the huts to watch their departure. The yellowish beam of the headlamps flickered over splintered walls, withering palm-leaf roofs, finally picked up the narrow trail leading away to the north; the van, scenting its quarry, moved forward with a new zest. The huts fell back to left and right and were lost; the grey-brown of the desert, monotonous and unyielding, reached out to engulf them. Slowly, almost methodically, the dust began to rise.
“Know what I’m asking myself?”
“I don’t,” said Johnny, who didn’t.
“If we turn east at the end of this valley, we’ll hit the road for Benghazi. Bound to, sooner or later. Care to go there instead?”
“It’s nearer.”
“It’s certainly nearer.”
“And safer?”
“It could be safer.”
“Well, please yourself. You’re the boss.”
O’Brien removed his glance momentarily from the road to study Johnny’s profile. “You mean, it’s all the same to you?”
“That’s right. I’ll be just as broke in whatever place we land up in.”
“Me, too,” said O’Brien, looking back at the road. “But in Tripoli, I’ve got friends.”
“In the police, perhaps?”
O’Brien chuckled. “No, not in the police. Just a feller I used to know.” He hesitated for a moment. “But that’s another reason for going to Tripoli.”
“What is?”
“The police. Me - I’m the sort of chap who likes an element of risk. It gives a bit of spice to this Goddam monotonous pilgrimage.”
Johnny nodded.
“Ever b
een in Benghazi? Stinking hole. The people there are no good, either; nothing but a lot of crooks.” O’Brien’s expression was virtuous in the extreme. “But Tripoli I like. So will you.”
“Tripoli it is, then.”
O’Brien’s right hand left the steering-wheel and began, slowly and meditatively, to button up his shirt against the dust. His left hand stayed poised, delicately as a butterfly, all its power latent within it, easing the labouring van through and over the countless ruts in the road. He cleared his throat and spat out of the window before continuing.
“We should be on velvet there. My friend’ll come across with my passage-money all right. And if we can sell this rusty old crate, it might cover your fare to Italy. Good mind to go there myself.”
“Not going back to England?”
“No fear,” said O’Brien. “Can’t. The cops want me there, as well.”
“Good Lord. Not another murder?”
“Don’t say murder. It isn’t a word I like. And nothing of that sort, anyway. Just a little matter of a few aeroplanes and things I sold that it appears I shouldn’t have. I don’t mind taking a gentleman’s chance with the cops out here,” said O’Brien reflectively, “but our English crowd are another cup of tea altogether. Very much too keen. No, I reckon Italy ought to be my stamping-ground till I can get me another plane. Got a girl there, anyway.”
“Yes?”
“Well, I had a girl there. In Rome. Great place, Rome; great place for doing business. Used to know quite a few people there.”