Red Joker

by Michael Nicholson

  ‘We sit tight,’ he said. ‘Nothing else we can do. Go out now and they’ll only nab us and chuck us inside. Or worse. When they’ve finished fighting and shot the nuisances, they’ll announce themselves and we’ll know what they stand for and what to expect. They’ll herd all the whities together and give us a lecture, probably be a few bruised heads, a couple of rapes, empty our pockets and then put us all on the first plane out. And I don’t suppose this nice little island will ever see a white face again. Unless it’s a bastard White Russian’s! ’

  ‘You think they’re Communists?’ asked Protheroe.

  ‘Well, you don’t suppose the animals in the Square were President Carter’s Peace Corps?’

  But Prentice hadn’t meant it to be funny, and no one laughed.

  ‘So we sit and wait to be chucked out?’ asked Protheroe standing by the door to the telex room.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Prentice. ‘What would you rather do? You haves your choice and you takes your pick. I’m staying put here until I’m told to leave.’

  He looked across to Faraday. ‘And I suggest, lad, you don’t show your camera. The last thing they’re going to love is a filmed record of everything.’

  ‘It’s already in its box,’ said Faraday.

  ‘Good,’ said Prentice. ‘Better it than you.’

  Doubleday’s Red Cross flags were finished. One hung over the front entrance, tied from the windows on the floor above. The second was stretched across the roof of the kitchen, held down by flowerpots. It would be clearly seen from the air though, as Prentice said, if the Air Force ever came to the rescue it wouldn’t be because of Doubleday’s sheets.

  The hotel was now as deserted as the streets outside. The cashier, the porters, barman, cleaners, maids and cooks and finally the manageress had quietly left one by one from the side door of the courtyard that led on to the side alley, back to their families to hide and wait. And every one of them carried rations of flour, nuts and fruit, wrapped up by the manageress in pillow cases for them.

  Faraday, washed and recovered from the nausea and the shock of witnessing his first violent death, sat quietly at the table next to Prentice. Doubleday sat opposite but said nothing. He listened to Prentice and Protheroe and nodded or shook his head at the right intervals of conversation. Faraday thought of Elizabeth, her father and George. The intrigue last night aboard the yacht now made sense. Pilger, as Elizabeth had insisted, had been preparing to leave probably during the night. He could have drifted out of the harbour without sail on the ebb tide to well beyond the harbour wall and no one would have heard him go.

  So somehow Pilger had known of the counter coup or at least that something was about to happen. But how? How could a foreigner, recluse, with no other ambition but sail and drift his days away, know something the government did not? Why, especially, not President Laurent?

  From the harbour came more sounds of gunfire and a quick succession of explosions equally spaced about three seconds apart. And then the single shots that Faraday had heard earlier, from a different rifle or rifles, from a single man or separate single men, crouched alone on roof tops firing occasional bullets at random targets in slow suicidal resistance. There was a long silence - ten minutes or more, then another long distant burst of machinegun fire, ten, fifteen seconds of it. And silence. Faraday was never to hear the single shots again.

  He thought of the President and Pilger, and he realized he had reasoned it all out in reverse, had started at the wrong end. If Pilger had known, there was only one way he could have found out. He had been warned by the President himself, his friend and fellow fisherman. That’s who he had been with yesterday, perhaps preparing a way out for them both.

  ‘Protheroe, come and sit down,’ Prentice shouted across to him. ‘We’ll hear the telex when it comes on if it comes on. And I doubt it. Christ! I doubt it.’

  ‘We’re on our own,’ he said. ‘And that helps. At least we only have the four of us to worry about.’

  ‘. . . six,’ said Faraday. ‘My crew upstairs.’

  Prentice nodded. ‘First thing we do is to lock the doors, including the front one and all the windows on the ground floor. Soon the bastards will be coming through town, taking stock and the longer we can delay our introductions the less uptight they’re likely to be. Might make it a little less unpleasant.’

  Doubleday shook his head in silence.

  Prentice went on, ‘When we’ve done that, Protheroe, you mind the telex. Remember it might only be on for a few seconds. Done a tape?’

  ‘Yes, it’s laced.’

  ‘How long’s your first take?’

  ‘Six lines, about thirty words.’

  ‘We don’t want any bleedin’ adjectives, cut out all the colour. There won’t be time for that crap, just Dateline, the Death and our Dilemma. Okay?’

  ‘Promise, Alf. Just the guts of it.’

  ‘Faraday, can your boys cook?’

  ‘I’ve never asked them.’

  ‘Well, you do that like a good lad, and get them to pile up all the food they can find, especially the tinned stuff and put it somewhere safe. I want you to collect all the candles and matches you can find and go into every room including ours and fill up every bath with cold water. Right?’

  Prentice turned to Doubleday. ‘You can get off your arse and sort out all the fondue sets this place has and fill them up with meths . . . I presume that’s what they use.’

  ‘Why the bath water?’ asked Faraday.

  ‘First thing that’ll happen, lad, is the electricity will go, so the water-pumps will stop, the tank upstairs will empty and we have had it. So you fill up the baths. And when the power goes your crew will have the fondues to cook on. With me?’

  Then he heaved himself up from the table, walked slowly to the bar and stood behind it. He took off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

  ‘Right lads, before we begin, a teeny snifter. And for the first time since we’ve been here, you’re going to get some decent service and some decent bloody helpings.’

  Faraday collected the bunch of keys from the porter’s desk and began moving from room to room turning on the bath taps and going through the drawers of the dressing- tables for candles.

  The more he thought of Pilger and how nervous he had been, the more certain he was that Pilger had known what was coming.

  He sat down on a dressing-table stool and looked at the dreadful probability in the mirror. Both President Laurent and Pilger had known something was about to happen, so both men must have made their own preparations for it. But the President was now dead. And a sniper hiding somewhere by the harbour wall now stopped him knowing whether Pilger’s departure had been in time. Whether he and Elizabeth had sailed George to safety or not.

  The telex light flicked on without warning and the line to London was through. Protheroe jabbed at the button and the tape began:

  DATELINE UNION FOR POOL REPEAT POOL COPY EXPRESS MIRROR MAIL ITN. INVASION AND COUNTER COUP. PRESIDENT LAURENT PUBLICLY HANGED. MUCH SHOOTING AND KILLING BY FOREIGN BLACK SOLDIERS SHOUTING MAPANOUZI REVOLUTION. EXPECT AIRLIFT EX PATS. HELP. WNMHTIXSK T RHEDIFOXTZ AFGLIITY . . . NC . . .

  The radio link was suddenly disrupted and the machine began to garble the letters of Protheroe’s second take as meaningless jumble. Then the light went out and the line was dead.

  The sniper, still hiding in cover of the fish shed directly opposite the shattered window of the chemist’s shop, saw the flash of orange and the spread of black smoke two miles beyond the harbour up the slope of the mountain. He counted five and heard the muffled sound of the explosion. He looked at his watch and smiled. According to the plan of attack outlined to them on board the launch by their leader in the red skullcap, the Radio Station was the fourth target, to be attacked at nine o’clock. And it was now one minute, twenty seconds past.

  9

  They were
eating cold baked beans and ham when they heard the lorries. Prentice, who was now keeping a diary of events for the story he would eventually write, timed it at exactly midday.

  They went to the windows on the first floor and watched from behind the thin lace curtains. The convoy was made up of every open vehicle on the island, tipper trucks, delivery vans, pick-ups and the long 20 ton articulated lorries used on the sugar estates. Faraday counted nearly sixty and every one of them was full of men and women guarded by soldiers sitting on the tailboards, guns across their knees.

  Faraday watched them drive along the Boulevard south, following the line of the shore and then turn abruptly right off the road down a concrete ramp sometimes used for launching the smaller fishing boats, on to the beach. Directed by soldiers in the lead vehicles, the convoy stopped level with each other in a line, their backs to the sea.

  Then the soldiers hit the sides of the lorries with the butts of their guns, the people jumped down, and pushed and prodded by the soldiers who surrounded them in a wide circle they began digging and filling the vehicles with sand. Within twenty minutes the first tipper truck, piled high with sand, was heaving itself off the beach up the ramp and back past the hotel. And forty minutes later as the last of the vehicles, full of sand, left the beach the first of the empty ones were returning for more.

  In the hour they had been standing at the window no one had spoken. Now Prentice turned away, sat down on a mahogany linen chest on the landing and looked up at them.

  ‘Why sand for Christ’s sake? Why sand?’ But no one answered.

  Prentice leant his head back against the wall. Somewhere in his recollections lorry-loads of sand had featured. He thought of the deserts of Sinai, Algeria, Ogeden, South-West Africa, India. Then he remembered. Seven years back, December 1971, the siege of Dacca, capital of East Pakistan, only days before it was due to be renamed Bangladesh by the conquering Indian tank commanders.

  He remembered its bombed runway cratered by the Indian Sukoy jets as they had destroyed the Pakistani Air Force. He remembered the British Royal Air Force C.130 transport planes from Singapore circling overhead, only a few hundred feet above the ground, remembered how he and fifty other journalists had helped fill in the bomb craters, scooping up earth and stones with bare hands, so that the planes could land and airlift out the British and American families who had been trapped there in the sudden war.

  And he remembered the two lorry loads of sand that had been brought in from the marshes to provide the RAF pilots with just enough runway to land on.

  ‘They’re extending the runway,’ Prentice said suddenly. ‘They’re going to bring in heavy planes . . . freighters full of men, transport, ammo and guns and the tarmac here isn’t long enough. So they’re extending it with sand.’

  ‘Planes can’t land on sand, Alf,’ said Protheroe, but he didn’t look away from the window.

  ‘Can, old lad. Once they’ve laid out enough corrugated steel mesh, and I reckon before the day’s out they’ll be doing just that! ’

  And he was right. A few minutes before six o’clock, the time of the promenade when the Boulevard should have been full of the island’s families strutting and waving, they heard the drone of engines above. They ran from the room, but the hotel windows were facing the wrong way, facing away from the island’s airstrip on the far side of La Souffrière, so they didn’t see the giant camouflaged Russian Ilyushin freighters come in low from the sea, barely above stalling speed a little over a hundred feet high, directly in line with the red funnel lights of the tarmac strip.

  The hundreds of people, men, women and older children who stood with their shovels, picks and rakes on the edge of the sand extension they had laid, watched as the bellies of the freighters opened and giant rolls of steel mesh tracks fell and bounced like rubber balls fifty yards away from them. The children held on tight to the hand nearest them, the women rubbed their eyes of the sand and dust, and their men, wet with the sweat of work, held a hand to their forehead and peered as the freighters’ engines roared to full power and the aircraft began their slow, lumbering climb around the slopes of the mountain and disappeared into the sun.

  The sudden noise and nearness frightened him. They were so unexpected and so low, and banking at such an angle the tips of their wings were only feet from the msasa trees. The aircraft had been so close he had seen the helmeted heads of the pilots, had smelt the kerosene and felt the hot draught of their exhausts as they had passed.

  He pushed the round stone slab back across the opening, wedged the prong of wood hard against it and then crawled back along the low narrow tunnel into the small arena. The sunlight was still reflecting down from the pale overhang of granite but within a few minutes the sun would set and minutes after that the twilight would quickly become darkness.

  He checked the candle, making sure the matchbox next to it was full, then he pulled aside the wooden box that served as his desk and saw that the poison had been eaten. He bent down, pushed a thin stick into the dead rat’s open mouth and flung it hard and high into the undergrowth outside. It was the seventh he had killed that day. Then he took the tin and began spreading the rat poison around the edge of the stone circle.

  He watched the sunlight lifting away, running up the walls. Soon the bats would begin their swooping and the cicadas would keep him awake until fatigue no longer made him hear. She had been gone now for over three hours and there was nothing he could do except wait for her to return. With or without.

  He looked at his watch. BBC World Service news in three minutes. He sat down on the floor, pulled the stitched rugs of goatskin and fox over his legs, broke open the hard shell of a pomegranate and began sucking out the sweet juicy pips. He wondered whether for the first time in his life he should pray. And then whether such a selfish first time appeal might not make matters worse. He only knew for certain he was alone and desperate for help, and could think of no other source for it.

  He found it as the last few bars of ‘Lillibullero’ were fading. He listened, hardly breathing, as the BBC newsreader in Bush House, six thousand miles away in London, read the headlines. Then he clapped his hands together tightly and shook them up and down.

  So they knew. God bless them they knew! Somehow the news had reached London, despite the invasion and the speed with which it had been completed. People would now do something, must do something. It could only be a short time now before they came to help.

  He looked up at the broad lip of rock that jutted out from the side of La Souffrière, looked into its blackness and shyly said aloud, ‘Thank you.’

  Then he pressed his finger and thumb into his eyes and was surprised to find them wet when he took them away again.

  They walked slowly down the street, line abreast through the early morning sea mist, ambling almost, except there was a certainty about them, a sense of procession. The morning was damp with the soft moist air, the mist that had bewildered so many earlier generations of sailors. At times they were simply shadows in the grey.

  They held their rifles across their bodies and low at arm’s length so that the curved metal magazines slapped against their thighs as their right legs went forward. Together in the still air it sounded like a dull drummer’s beat.

  Those on the road were looking high to rooftops they couldn’t see and to second- and third-floor windows that only occasionally showed themselves. Those on the pavements either side looked ahead and sometimes quickly behind. Without warning they would break open a front door with their rifle butts or smash a window and the line would stop as the others searched. One of them brought out a chicken, struggling until he twisted its neck and dropped it into a large flapped pocket of his camouflaged tunic.

  No one spoke, no orders were given, no one seemed in command. Their discipline was collective.

  They rounded the corner from the harbour and were passing the broken window of the chemist’s shop as the sniper came out fr
om the cover of the fish shed. He gave an abrupt salute and spoke to the one nearest him. Then he pointed along the Boulevard Dr Clobert towards the Hotel de la Quai and the patrol moved again.

  ‘I can see them. He’s told them we’re here.’

  Faraday was standing by the first-floor bay window, protected by the lace curtain from any sniper’s sights.

  ‘So it’s D-Day plus one,’ said Prentice. He dug his spoon into the last of his boiled egg, the best breakfast Faraday’s crew could provide on the single fondue burner. Unable to find an egg-cup, he had cleverly wedged the egg into the centre of a lavatory roll. Protheroe moved to Faraday’s shoulder.

  ‘Twenty of them, Alf. Blacks. Big bastards! What do we do when they come for Christ’s sake? What do we say?’

  Prentice didn’t answer. Ten, fifteen seconds later he finished his egg, squashed it deep into the tube, wiped his lips on the pink tissue and heaved himself up off the chest. He walked to the window.

  ‘What do we do? What do we say?’ He pulled the curtain a few inches apart. ‘Jesus! You’re right, they’re bloody evil. Look as if they’re slow-marching to a funeral.’ He let go the curtain. ‘Maybe they are. Anyway,’ he belched into his hand, ‘we let them do all the doing and all the saying. So get Doubleday from his bloody bedroom and your crew from the kitchen, lad, and we all sit downstairs. It’ll save them the aggravation of searching the place, and we don’t want to upset them, do we?’

  Faraday and Protheroe got up to leave on their separate errands.

  ‘And, lad,’ said Prentice. ‘Take it easy, eh? It’s your first time, so best watch how it’s done. Just leave it to Protheroe and me.’

  Prentice was at ease despite everything. What he said, what he did, had the mark of things tried and tested. And Faraday hadn’t seen him drink anything but water since that last one in the bar twenty-four hours ago when the anonymous voice in Reception had announced the President’s death.