The Beaufort Sisters

by Jon Cleary

  ‘How much do you pay these troops?’

  ‘The blacks? Almost nothing. They wouldn’t know what to do with more money.’ Gaston Onza had better turn out to be a dictator; his wife did not sound like the concept of a democratic President. ‘The white mercenaries are the expensive ones. They are asking $1000 a month each. They are up for auction. They know there are other people who want to buy them, too.’

  ‘How can you trust men like that?’

  ‘They seem to have a peculiar code of honour. Once they’re signed, they fight for the man who pays them.’ But Michele was too cynical to believe that any man had a code of honour: ‘Maybe it’s because they know that if they desert on one job, they won’t get another.’

  ‘So how do we take the money to these men?’

  ‘Do you still have your pilot’s licence? Good. Then we can hire a plane and fly it out to Katanga. The money can always be hidden in the plane and the Customs people along the way are never that conscientious anyway. They won’t be with two good-looking women like us.’

  Sally had felt her own excitement growing from the moment she had stepped aboard the Swissair plane at Heathrow. During the drive out to the airport she had been torn between wanting to go on and turning back; but as if sensing her indecision, Michele had taken her hand and held it gently but firmly. Again the old weakness had taken hold of her; she told herself that being with Michele was better than being alone; but she knew that being with Michele was better than anything at all. Then as the plane had climbed into the traffic lanes and headed for Zurich, as the whispered talk about the planned revolution had progressed, there had been no longer any thought of turning back. And now that she might fly a plane all the way down through Africa to the Congo, she sat waiting impatiently for them to land at Zurich.

  They checked into the Baur au Lac: Sally remembered Magnus’s recommendation of the hotel. They made love that night and everything was as it had been when they had first met. Sally went to sleep exhausted and happy; all the tension had gone out of her and she looked young and ready for any adventure. Almost like the carefree tomboy of ten years ago: but Michele had never known that girl.

  In the morning they went to the bank, met the Director and arranged for the money to be handled as Sally directed. As she signed the various forms she wondered what Philip, or more especially old Tony Gentleman, would think of what she was doing with the money. It was not going to be used for respectable purposes: it was being turned back into the dirty money it had once been.

  The Director was disappointed that so much money was being moved out of a single account at the one time, but he did not ask questions. There was still a deposit of almost another four million dollars, including the interest that had been earned over the past two years.

  ‘You will be retaining the balance, Madame Mann?’

  ‘Indefinitely,’ said Sally, hiding her reaction to being called Madame Mann; she had long ago given up thinking of herself as such. ‘I shall be back tomorrow morning for the cash. I take it that this will go no further than it has to in the bank?’

  The Director knew she did not mean to be insulting. ‘Discretion is the other interest we pay on your account, Madame Mann.’

  They left the bank, went to the airport and caught a plane for Marseilles. The man they wanted to see in Marseilles had an office at the end of the airport. He was short, muscular, had a black beard and dark suspicious eyes. But he smiled, showing tobacco-stained teeth, when Michele mentioned who had given her his name.

  ‘Him? Sure, I went out to Libya and serviced those planes for him. So your husband bought them, did he? They’re good. A bit old but good. You want to buy some more?’

  ‘No, we just want to hire a plane.’

  ‘A two-engined job,’ said Sally. ‘One with a good range.’

  ‘How long will you want it?’

  ‘Two weeks.’

  ‘Two weeks? Where are you going? No, don’t tell me. You get your own papers if you’re going to fly it out of France. But the price is going to be high. I’ll have to treble the insurance – ’

  ‘The price doesn’t matter,’ said Sally; her father would have chided her for such a reckless business approach. ‘Will it be ready to go in two hours?’

  ‘It’ll be ready,’ said the man. ‘Just make sure you bring it back. Don’t go fighting any wars in it,’ he said, looking at Michele. ‘It’s a Beechcraft, not a B-52.’

  They flew back to Zurich in the Beechcraft in the late afternoon. Next morning they went to five consulates in the city. Michele already had visas for the countries the consulates represented. She stayed outside in the rented car; she did not want any of the consulate officials to know that she would be accompanying Sally; news can fly faster than planes. Sally, paying extra in cash without a receipt, got the quick service she asked for at each consulate. She told the consular officers that she was flying out to Kenya, delivering the Beechcraft to a friend in Nairobi. She could not be sure that all, or any, of them believed her. But her money and her looks were good and the necessary papers were passed over without too many enquiries. She had given up thinking of herself as Sarah Mann, relinquishing her passport in that name to prove it to herself; now she had to produce her new passport in her maiden name. A couple of the consulate officers looked at her carefully, but no comment was made. Beaufort was not a common name, but it was not as uncommon as Rockefeller: that name would be a real handicap.

  After the visits to the consulates she and Michele went to the bank and collected the million dollars in Swiss francs, packing them into the two suitcases they had brought with them. Michele had bought the suitcases while Sally had been in one of the consulates. Sally remarked that Michele had a proper sense of the fitness of things: the cases were Vuitton bags, you didn’t carry a million dollars in any old carry-all.

  They drove out to the airport and spent some time stowing the money away behind panels in the cabin. It was an obvious hiding place but again they were relying on their femaleness; women smugglers were not as common then as they were later to become. There was no reason why Customs officers along the way should suspect two good-looking women, obviously wealthy, of any nefarious business in Nairobi, the stated destination on their papers. By the time they had finished hiding the money it was too late to take off.

  ‘Which of us stays with the plane?’ said Michele.

  ‘Why?’

  Michele sighed with exasperation and wonder; gradually her hard shell was cracking under the pressure of the excitement growing within her. ‘The money, for God’s sake! Someone could steal it.’

  Sally did not argue: she knew she had been stupidly careless in thinking that the money should be left unguarded. Certain people at the bank, if no one else, knew that she had taken the money away in cash. But: ‘All right, we both sleep out here. We can say we want to get off first thing in the morning. But are we going to sleep with the money all the way to the Congo?’

  Michele swallowed the exasperation that threatened to grow into anger. Sally just didn’t know what people had to go through on their way to the top. ‘It’s not too much, is it? If you want to sleep in a hotel, all right. But I’m staying with the plane.’

  Sally could see she had upset Michele. All at once she did not want the journey spoiled by a lovers’ quarrel. ‘We’ll sleep with the money all the way. I just hope some randy ground mechanic doesn’t think we’re easy meat and tries to attack us.’

  ‘There’s a gun under the passenger’s seat. A Luger 7.65. Gaston tells me it’s very effective.’

  ‘For God’s sake! Who put it there?’

  ‘I did.’ She leaned back against the plane, pulling the collar of her coat up against the cold wind blowing off the lake. She was not wearing the mink: that in itself would invite a thief somewhere along the trip. This coat was black leather, expensive but not blatantly so. ‘Darling, this isn’t going to be like some of those jaunts we used to take here in Europe. We’re not flying to Rheims or Monza to watch some Gra
nd Prix motor race. Africa, north, south or in the middle, is nothing like what you’ve been used to. And once we get down to the Congo it is going to be dangerous.’

  ‘I’ve never been afraid of danger before.’ Which was true. ‘You said that yourself when we were driving in the rallies.’

  ‘This is different. It’s not a game, Sally, not any more.’

  Sally pulled her own coat tightly about her. It was an old camel-hair coat of Nina’s that she had found ideal for driving or flying; it was worn on the cuffs and there were stains on it but she never noticed those blemishes. She did not know that it had already been worn through one terrible ordeal, that Nina had been wearing it when she had been kidnapped and had never worn it since.

  ‘I know that, Michele. I don’t think of anything between you and me any more as a game. Least of all this. But I still have to get used to the idea of what we’re doing. I’m not as ambitious as you. I don’t want to be the President’s wife.’

  She had not meant to say the last words. But they were part of the jealousy she still felt towards Gaston Onza and it would always be there just below the surface.

  Michele straightened up, chin out. ‘It’s not too late for you to change your mind!’

  Later Sally knew that was the moment when she should have said she was not going, that the whole adventure was foolish and couldn’t possibly succeed. But she was not here because of faith in an adventure, not even for the sake of adventure itself. She was here because of Michele.

  ‘I’ll go back to the hotel and collect our bags. We’ll leave first thing in the morning.’

  3

  Because Sally had not been able to learn for certain where fuel could be bought along the way, she took the longest route. They flew from Zurich to Rome, then to Tunis, then to Casablanca. From there they went on down the west coast of Africa. They met storms, officious Customs officers, mechanical trouble; but nothing delayed them unduly. They did not stay longer than one night at any place, except at Conakry where they had to wait two days while Sally went seeking a replacement for a damaged piston. The man in Marseilles who had rented them the plane had provided a kit of spares, but he had forgotten to include a spare set of pistons.

  ‘My mother came from here,’ said Michele. ‘She was born up-country but she met my father in Conakry.’

  ‘Is she still alive?’ Sally knew so little about Michele’s life.

  Michele shrugged: with her the umbilical cord had never been more than a thin frayed string. ‘I don’t know. We never got on.’

  Sally was appalled at such lack of feeling: one should love one’s mother, even if one sometimes also hated her. She had always loved her own mother, more perhaps than Edith had ever realized. ‘If you – if Gaston succeeds in what he’s trying to do, won’t she try and get in touch with you?’

  ‘I doubt if she’d hear about me. My father’s dead and if she’s still alive she could have gone back to her village. They often do.’ They: the blacks. She said it as if their blood was completely alien to her own. ‘I changed my name when I ran away from home. She wouldn’t know who Michele Mauriac is.’

  ‘What is your real name then?’ Somehow she felt a sense of betrayal, as if she were in love with a stranger. Even her own husband had not used his true name.

  Michele smiled, put a long slim finger against Sally’s lips. ‘Darling, names don’t matter. We’re not in love with each other’s names.’

  They stayed with the plane that night and the next, as they had done all through the trip. Sometimes they had felt it wise to bribe the airport security men, being careful to pay just so much and not too much. Sally, who had all her life been so indifferent to money, was now acutely aware of the Swiss francs stowed away behind the panelling in the aircraft. She slept only fitfully in the locked cabin of the plane; but Michele slept as if she were in bed at the Baur au Lac. Only once, at Dakar, had someone come trying to open the cabin door: Michele had sat up at once, the Luger pistol in her hand, and whoever it was had scuttled off into the darkness. Sally was finding that being on the ground was the most wearing and nerve-wracking part of the trip. She began to wish she had chosen a more direct route, down through Egypt and the Sudan. But Michele had told her things were just as unsettled in the Sudan as they were in the Congo. The long way round had its disadvantages, but it was best. The coast, said Michele, the white in her speaking, at least was civilized.

  So two days in Conakry, then they took off for Abidjan, then Lagos, Douala, Libreville and Brazzaville. From there they had to fly direct across the Congo to an airstrip in the mountains north-west of Elisabethville.

  ‘Gaston won’t be there to meet us. He is going to run things from the inside, in Elisabethville. We’ll be met by the mercenaries and they’ll take us in in their convoy.’

  Sally had had moments of apprehension throughout the trip, but they had been outweighed by the exhilaration she had felt. She was once again doing something; and for love of someone. But now she felt a sudden sense of danger; she looked out across the Congo River. It was more than just a border between two countries; it was the boundary between neutrality and commitment. Once across there, in the company of Michele and with all that money hidden in the aircraft, she would be a rebel, part of the enemy of the government.

  They had landed at Brazzaville at dusk, coming in when the airport was almost deserted. The air was heavily humid, making them both sweat; Michele glistened like polished brown marble. It seemed to Sally that she looked darker, as if, chameleon-like, she were taking on the colouring of their environment, letting her mother’s blood come out in her. Sally all at once felt conspicuous, whiter than white: the detergent commercial didn’t know the dangers in its slogan in certain parts of the world. She wiped the sweat from her face, not all of it due to the humidity, and looked at the man in the white drill suit appearing like a ghost out of the dusk.

  ‘Madame Onza! They told me two ladies had just arrived in their own plane. I had no idea it was you.’ He was black and heavily-built and spoke French fluently in a soft bass voice.

  ‘Inspector Luba!’ Sally detected the edgy note in Michele’s voice, she who normally was never put out by anyone. ‘On duty at this hour?’

  ‘A policeman’s job is a twenty-four-hour one.’ He looked at Sally. ‘A friend?’

  ‘Mlle Beaufort, a very old friend. Inspector Luba is an old friend of my husband’s. Their fathers were cousins.’

  ‘On opposite sides of the river,’ said Luba, smiling broadly, but did not explain how the family had been separated. ‘Where are you staying, Madame Onza?’

  ‘We haven’t checked in at any hotel. We’re concerned for our plane.’

  ‘You have nothing to fear here.’ Luba waved a big graceful hand; it seemed that he was trying to be more Gallic than de Gaulle. Sally had heard about the British colonials who did their best to sound more British than their masters. She wondered who in time would want to be more American than the Americans. Possibly only pop singers. ‘I personally shall see that your plane is guarded. How long are you staying? Just tonight? I shall take you personally to the best hotel we have and see personally that you are accommodated. Perhaps you will be my guests at dinner?’

  ‘Inspector Luba, you are too kind – ’

  Luba waved a deprecating hand; it was dark now and all that showed was the gentle wave of the white-clad arm. ‘So few people say that about a policeman. We are here to help – ’

  ‘But we are exhausted, Inspector. Perhaps next time?’

  Luba took the refusal graciously. He conjured up two policemen out of the darkness, summoning them with a whistle. detailed them to guard the aircraft, then insisted on driving Michele and Sally into town.

  ‘I shall take you to the Hotel Independence.’ He banged his fist on the horn button; two cyclists fell away in front of the speeding car as if they had been mowed down by gunfire. ‘Africa is full of Hotels Independence these days. Soon they will rival the Hilton chain.’

  ‘Is there a
n Independence chain?’ Sally asked.

  ‘What a droll sense of humour your friend has, Madame Onza.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘No, Mlle Beaufort, they are all owned by Europeans trying to prove they are in favour of independence. And we know how much they were in favour of it, don’t we, Madame Onza?’

  ‘Yes.’

  In the back seat Sally could see the stiffness in Michele’s body, felt the tension tighten within herself. Beyond the yellow swath of the headlamps the blackness of Africa suddenly threatened her. She wanted to turn back, but knew it was already too late.

  Luba left them at the hotel, personally telling the manager that Madame Onza and Mlle Beaufort had to be given the best room and the best attention. Then he kissed the hand of each woman and retired, a black boulevardier who could sweep everyone off the boulevards if he wished.

  Sally and Michele had dinner in their room, a service they might not have received had it not been that the manager wished to please Inspector Luba. Later, when it was time for bed, Sally switched off the light and pushed open the shutters of the window.

  ‘Close them,’ said Michele sharply. ‘Anything might fly in during the night.’

  Sally closed the shutters, pausing for a moment to look out at the yellow moon shedding its fleece of cloud. A lamp hung from a tree in the back garden of the hotel; a living shade of moths and insects shrouded it. Vampire-bats flew stiff-winged above the trees and a cat crept along a path like a mangy leopard. A gramophone was playing in one of the other rooms: Edith Piaf consoled some expatriate who couldn’t go home. She closed the shutters, groped her way through the darkness into the single bed. The manager had shown them to a room with twin beds; Sally had noticed that Michele had not stated a preference for a room with a double bed. Perhaps she felt the night would be too warm, for the room had no air-conditioning; perhaps she felt that two women sleeping together was something frowned upon in the new Africa, that independence was only for men. In any case she made no comment to Sally, who now suddenly longed for the comfort of Michele’s arms but was afraid to ask.