The Mercenaries

by The Mercenaries (The Jade Wind) (retail) (epub)

  ‘This little tea-party appears to be jammed full of exciting possibilities,’ Ira observed ruefully to Sammy.

  He wasn’t far wrong. Within a week it had become quite clear that nothing, whether business or pleasure, could be done directly in China. Every approach was devious and protracted, and nothing could be achieved without a middle-man’s rake-off, or ‘squeeze,’ and, staring at the instructions given him by Lao at Moshi, at Kowalski’s letters, at the notebook that was suddenly full of things which had to be done, and the lists of all the things they were lacking, Ira was conscious of a sad letting-down of the spirit.

  ‘Let’s hope there’s a bit more bloody organisation in Hwai-Yang,’ he said with feeling.

  Fortunately, Kowalski was well used to the tortuous delays and the complex methods of working, and wasn’t in the slightest put out. He had conducted them to their hotel and had seen them installed, talking business with Ira all the time, filling a notebook with his lists of demands, unflurried by the need for urgency and the prospect of unfailing vacillation on the part of the Chinese. Though it took time, he began to find them tools, drills, hacksaws, lamps, batteries, oil, grease, paint, a lathe, and even a small petrol generator.

  ‘Tsu’s going to start squealing soon,’ he grinned as he turned them over to Ira. ‘He was never known for his generosity and this little lot’s going to cost him a packet of dollars, believe me.’

  ‘We haven’t even started yet,’ Ira commented grimly.

  To their surprise, and although they spent most of their time on the Chinese side of the Yangtze, their arrival had not gone unnoticed; and a few red-faced English matrons, picking up their wavelength on the grapevine of gossip, began to call at their hotel, leaving cards and inviting them to cocktail parties. For the most part they were large and frozen-faced and seemed to consider they were doing them a favour.

  Wealth and position were the criteria of virtue in white Shanghai and they were obviously expected to take up their proper place in an accepted hierarchy with the British Minister and his satellites at the top. The invitations were strictly formal and never failed to have Ira’s correct rank and every one of his decorations in the right order.

  ‘God, they do things right out here, don’t they?’ he observed to Kowalski, turning over a sheet of pasteboard as big as the blade of a shovel.

  ‘Brother,’ Kowalski laughed, ‘you just try and do ’em wrong.’

  Ira tapped the pasteboard. ‘Think we ought to go?’ he asked.

  ‘It’ll maybe grease a few wheels and open a few doors.’

  The party was not the success they had hoped for, however, because Fagan drank too much, and Ellie – in a shapeless and old-fashioned dress that hung on her lean frame like a sack – reacted to the monumental British formality by being rude in the best transatlantic manner. The final straw was the appearance of Ira’s over-eager girl-friend from the voyage out, a clear knockout in a dress that must have cost a fortune and her eyes gleaming at the sight of Ira. They called a taxi early and, bundling the protesting Fagan into it, headed for the safety of the Chinese side of the river. There were no further invitations, especially when it was discovered they were working for the Chinese instead of the Chinese working for them.

  * * *

  From this point on, spares began to arrive in dribs and drabs on the bare marshy field at Linchu that seemed to be constantly swept by warm showers and high winds, to be followed at once – almost as though they could smell work – by a vast number of coolies, carpenters, laundrymen and labourers, each one with his assistant and his makee-learn boy, who trailed around after him learning pidgin English and the habits of Europeans for the time when he, too, would work for one.

  None of them was much good and those who didn’t regard the aeroplanes as a rather elaborate joss, like the paper animals and motor cars and furniture they’d seen carried at weddings and funerals, considered them highly dangerous beasts that had to be approached with care. Within a week, one of them had blown himself up opening a can of motor spirit with a cadged cigarette in his mouth, and when they picked him up with singed eyebrows and hair and a startled look on his face, he promptly turned and bolted from the field, never to return.

  They all seemed to get on with Ira, but Sammy, although he made them giggle and roll on the ground at the string of dubious Chinese words he’d begun to pick up, never missed a thing they did wrong and became known to them as a man whose eyes could see not only forward but also in the opposite direction through the back of his head.

  Neither Ellie nor Fagan was a mechanic and was able to do no more than the simplest inspections, so that Ira managed to insist at least on a routine check on all engines before they even contemplated moving north. Leaving the resentful Fagan and the coolies to concern themselves with sorting out spares in the tents Kowalski had produced, they set up a fitter’s bench on a flat stone and, with trestles flung together by a Chinese carpenter, got down to testing compression and examining ignition, valves and pumps, going through what ill-kept log books and inspection sheets Fagan possessed, and comparing invoices and lists of spares that came, with the lists of those that never came.

  Fagan grumbled all the time, noisy, pathetic, resentful of Ira’s authority, yet curiously attractive with his lunatic humour and his Irish charm. ‘White men don’t get themselves covered with grease and oil, me eager ould son,’ he pointed out gaily.

  ‘That’s OK,’ Ira said equably, ‘I don’t think any of ours will know how to service a Mercedes DIII.’

  Fagan made one of his wild gestures. ‘Ah, Sweet Sufferin’ J., they can do it with someone standin’ over ’em, can’t they?’ he insisted. ‘We got some of the townsfolk to do it in South Africa, we never worried very much.’

  Ira studied him for a moment. ‘I expect that’s why your motors always cut,’ he said gravely. ‘And why you killed yourselves with such monotonous regularity.’

  Fagan studied him for a second, then he gave his mad laugh. ‘Ach, well,’ he shouted, ‘there’s nothin’ like a disaster or two for puttin’ a sparkle in the old eye, is there?’

  He was never serious, rarely entirely sober and always difficult to work with. Among other things, he claimed to be a practising Catholic and, flourishing a rosary, demanded time off to go into Shanghai to worship.

  Since he didn’t return until late and didn’t seem very sober when he did, Ira soon decided he used most of the time for drinking. He was devious, not very clever and unwilling to take orders, and dodged away most afternoons to sleep off his previous night’s whisky.

  Eventually he failed to turn up at all and Ellie’s face grew more and more thunderous as the day progressed. The following morning Kowalski sent a message by his Chinese clerk in a taxi to the effect that he’d found Fagan drunk and required Ira’s assistance to get him home.

  ‘God damn him,’ Ira snorted in disgust as he threw down his tools. ‘I wouldn’t mind if all the bastard did was pinch the coolies to fetch him Hong Kong beer from Linchu – which is what he does most of the time.’

  The taxi dropped him at the address in Shanghai that Kowalski had given him, but it turned out to be a brothel where there were plush red sofas, gilt mirrors and a sleazy Russian blonde, her skin dusted with white powder so that her flesh looked faintly greenish, who insisted Fagan owed her twenty dollars.

  ‘’Twas the bullet I got at Balaclava,’ Fagan said as they fought to get him past the blonde and into the taxi. ‘It was jumpin’ in the wound and I needed a drink to take away the pain. Don’t let Ellie see me, bhoys. She’ll wipe the floor with me if she finds out.’

  As they reached the hotel and appeared on the landing upstairs from the grilled lift the porters used, the furious, affronted Ellie was waiting for them in the doorway of her room, her eyes glittering, her mouth a tight line.

  ‘OK,’ she said between gritted teeth. ‘Go ahead, get him inside and I’ll crack his skull with the bed leg.’

  The confrontation ended in a farcical scene on the
landing with Fagan swaying in large trembling dignity in front of her, his face twisted into a sad clown’s grin that was meant to express understanding and love. Its only effect was to make her drag his gun out of his luggage and threaten to shoot him with it.

  ‘I ought to put a slug in you, you treacherous, stinking, whoring son-of-a-bitch,’ she snapped.

  ‘’Twouldn’t be worth it,’ he said. ‘She had none of the unparalleled virtuosity at the game I’ve come to expect from you.’

  His attempt at humour burst in his face as Ellie immediately exploded into a rage again, storming up and down the corridor, swinging the enormous Colt while he grinned his death’s head grin at her and the giggling waiters and the floor-boys and the liftman all looked on from the stairs.

  The following morning, though Fagan didn’t appear, Ellie was waiting in the hotel lobby for the car that took them to the airfield, as though nothing had happened. Her face was expressionless and her lips tight, and she sat huddled in her old leather coat, obviously not intending to make or receive comments on what had happened. It had very early become clear that she and Fagan had never legalised their marriage before a priest or a registrar, but, though Fagan didn’t hesitate to throw out hints about their relationship, Ellie hugged it to herself as though she had had long since regretted it and had no intention of sharing her secret with anyone.

  ‘One thing,’ Sammy observed grudgingly. ‘She doesn’t let you down.’

  The work proceeded slowly and laboriously, with Fagan always more a hindrance than a help, though Ellie, when she wasn’t occupied in handling him, took the indifferent conditions in her stride. Like everyone else, she was caught by Sammy’s infectious enthusiasm and was well used to eating al fresco meals in tents.

  ‘I’m the original outdoor girl,’ she pointed out. ‘I’ve been doing this since I left the cradle and I guess I’ve not lived in a house for more than a coupla months in my whole life.’

  With her taut-spring manner, it was hard to imagine her being feminine enough to cry, but, after raised voices in the room along the corridor where she and Fagan conducted their eternal warring, they often heard her, sharp and incisive above Fagan’s wheedling, suddenly collapse into unexpected sobbing.

  She never let them see her weakness, however, as though she had long since sworn to herself never to expect sympathy, and she was always crisp and efficient in everything she did at the field. And she never refused any task, however dirty, though one of her more startling habits, in spite of the indifferent weather and the cool breeze and the stares of the coolies, was to strip to the waist after work in the evening to wash the oil off.

  ‘She’s a nut,’ Sammy commented, staring over the engine compartment of the Albatros to where she was towelling her lean body by the tent. ‘They’re both nuts. It’s a wonder they didn’t all kill themselves in South Africa. They’ve been runnin’ these motors on auto petrol or something to save money, and it’s played hell with the valves.’

  * * *

  Aviation petrol arrived at last, in drums on a creaking cart pulled by a couple of drowsy oxen, together with oil, and two more tents. As Kowalski was able to find them, a decent fitter’s bench followed, with rope, blocks, tackles, a Weston purchase, a new generator and as many spares as he could find. As the weather gradually began to brighten and the sun began to dry the earth, the wind blew up vast storms of yellow dust that got into their eyes and nostrils and between their teeth and forced them to erect screens over the engines.

  Between them, Ira and the tireless Sammy had the Albatros assembled when Geary and Lawn turned up again. They were flat broke and they climbed out of the taxi in a heap, minus their luggage.

  Sammy was standing on a trestle alongside the Fokker, drawing a piston from the engine, and he turned without saying a word, laid it on the bench, wrapped clean rags round it, and climbed down, wiping his hands on a ball of waste cotton.

  Lawn was looking sheepish as Ira strode towards them, but Geary had a fag-end in his mouth and his face wore a mutinous expression. Ira eyed them grimly, more than ready for a fight. They’d been having trouble with the BMW, whose condition had reduced Sammy to a speechless fury, and not much had gone right for some time.

  Geary seemed to anticipate trouble and indicated Ellie even before Ira had come to a stop.

  ‘I don’t like working for a woman, sonny,’ he said. ‘I never worked for a woman before.’

  Ira snorted. ‘You’ll work for whoever I tell you to work for. And if I see you crawling off to a bar again when you should be here I cancel your contract immediately. I can recruit whole squadrons of fitters in Shanghai if I want ’em – and all of ’em better than you.’

  As they turned away, he touched Geary’s arm and indicated Sammy standing nearby with glittering eyes, clutching a wrench in his fist and more than willing to give back what he’d received.

  ‘One other thing, Mr Geary,’ he said, short, stocky and distinctly hostile. ‘If you touch Sammy again – if you so much as lay a finger on him, or anyone else either – I’ll personally take you apart myself. Right?’

  Geary stared down at him for a second, defiantly, then his eyes dropped and he nodded.

  ‘Right.’ Ira gestured at the aircraft with a hand that was black-green with the thick sump-oil from the BMW, which had spread its dark smears on his clothes and face. ‘Now get your bloody coats off! I want these machines flying.’

  ‘OK, son,’ Lawn said uncertainly, trying to placate him and still a little condescending.

  ‘And don’t call me “Sonny”!’

  Lawn jumped. ‘No, sir,’ he said, and without thinking threw up an instinctive salute.

  As they sullenly took off their jackets and turned towards the machines, Fagan put a heavy hand on Ira’s shoulder. ‘By the Holies,’ he said. ‘The soldierly straightness of him! How’s that, Ellie, for handling the beer-cheapened hoddy-noddy? I know now why the English won the war.’

  Ira’s temper exploded. ‘Do you?’ he snorted. ‘Looking round at what we’ve got here, I don’t!’

  He was staring at Fagan as he spoke and the Irishman flushed. As he turned away, Ira saw Ellie looking at him out of the corner of her eye. She was standing with her feet apart, hugging her elbows in a stance she often used, the short fair curls falling over her forehead. As she caught his eyes on her, she came to life abruptly and began to walk towards the aeroplanes. Then she stopped and turned, looking back at him.

  ‘Makes a change, I guess,’ she said in a fiat voice, ‘to have a guy around who knows what he wants.’

  Then she gave him a twisted smile that was not unfriendly and strolled off after Fagan.

  Chapter 7

  Although Linchu was a bleak little place of mud and wattle huts, with nothing to offer a group of red-blooded young people with money to burn and an excited willingness to explore, there was plenty to do in Shanghai just across the river, without having to rely on the business and diplomatic circles of the International Settlement. In spite of the Sikh policemen and the ferociously efficient Customs Service, the city was alive with touts, pimps, white slavers, thieves, smugglers and pick-pockets, with a great deal of graft and corruption in the hands of White Russian refugees from the Bolshevik revolution who were prepared for a price to provide anything from a car to a woman.

  Every morning the newspapers carried some new sensation, whether it was murder, gang rivalry, opium smuggling or the sacking of some town up-country in the interminable civil war inland. Every evening there were eager girls – some of them even from the staid homes along the Bubbling Well Road, who were bored with cocktails and the eternal dinner and tennis parties, and found fliers more exciting than stockbrokers – and Ira and Sammy rarely got back to their hotel before the early hours of the morning.

  Sometimes Fagan was with them in their search for somewhere to spend their money, and sometimes even Ellie, chatting professionally about aeroplanes in her crisp businesslike way with Sammy. Fagan seemed to have discovered all the no
isiest, most scandalous dives in Shanghai, and had a gift – when he wasn’t in the doom-laden mood that set Ellie’s nerves on edge – of turning even the simplest meal into a celebration. He was always picking up European or Chinese girls for the unattached Ira and Sammy, whom he seemed to feel were missing something from life without anyone to share their beds, and there were wild parties and difficult moments in the early hours of the morning, and more than a few tears and high words at bedroom doors.

  He seemed to regard the boyish Sammy as the ideal butt for his jokes.

  ‘I don’t want your bloody women!’ Sammy was finally driven to yell at him after he had spent half an hour shoving two Chinese girls into Sammy’s room as fast as Sammy had shoved them out.

  Fagan hooted with laughter. ‘Why?’ he demanded. ‘You got one already?’

  ‘No.’ Sammy glared. ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘Maybe you prefer boys?’

  His face furious, Sammy leapt across the bed, his fists swinging, and the two of them rolled on the floor in the corridor, with the two Chinese girls screaming for help at the top of the stairs.

  Ira separated them with difficulty and pushed Fagan into his own room, doubled up with mirth. For Sammy, however, it was no laughing matter.

  ‘One of these days,’ he said cryptically, ‘that bleddy lunatic’s going to die of one of his own jokes.’

  * * *

  In spite of Fagan and the willing girls, they managed to remain uninvolved, even if heavily engaged, and for all the late nights, even managed to put in a great deal of work. Within a week they had the Fokker reassembled and airworthy, with Sammy lying over the engine compartment and Ira in the cockpit, the propeller turning at low revs while a couple of coolies draped themselves over the tail. Sammy’s head was cocked as he studied the tappets and listened to the ticks and clicks behind the firing of the cylinders, his thin sensitive craftsman’s face alight with pleasure. Ira watched him with pride because Sammy’s skill was his own, accepted greedily and already improved upon. He felt warmer towards Sammy than anyone else in the world. Together they seemed already to have been through a lifetime not only of disasters and disappointments but also of hectic affairs and noisy parties, and Sammy, with his thin body and beaky face, the absolute antithesis of Ira’s stocky bulk, was nearer to him, he decided, than his own family had ever been.