Harkaway's Sixth Column (25 page)

‘And with you, Yussuf,’ Harkaway said. ‘What have you heard?’

‘Wahali
- by God, effendi! Is much trouble. The Italian officers are growing afraid of mutiny.’

‘You know what that means, don’t you?’ Gooch said. ‘It means the place’s wide open.’

Tully grinned. ‘And that means booze and food and beds and women. The Eyeties set up brothels everywhere they go, don’t they? All we do is walk in and help ourselves.’

‘If you think that,’ Harkaway said, ‘you don’t know much about the Italians. Can you imagine an Italian officer handing over his command to you? Look at you.’

Tully looked down at himself. His shorts had ragged fringes, his socks had holes and his boots were falling apart.

‘All right, then,’ Gooch said. ‘Come up with a better one.’

‘Let’s give ‘em full honours. Drums. Bands. The lot. They’ll surrender to a lieutenant-colonel and his party of white officers.’

‘Us?’

‘Of course.’

‘Where do we get the pips?’

‘We dig up Watson.’

‘Dig up Watson?’ Gooch stared at Harkaway, aghast. ‘You going to wear his clothes?’

‘Just his pips. Danny can sew. She can make the crowns.’

Gooch looked at Tully. ‘Who gets to wear ‘em?’ he asked.

Harkaway smiled. ‘I do,’ he said.

They paused just long enough to make themselves presentable. Dressed in khaki trousers and shirt, shoulders emblazoned with metal stars cut from tins and blackened in the cooking fire, Danny watched Harkaway anxiously. With his ‘promotion’, he seemed to have acquired a new presence, arrogant, commanding and haughty. With Watson’s pips and the crowns she had made, she had to admit, he
looked
like a colonel. Even his entourage looked important. Two of Watson’s pips were sewn on Gooch’s shirt and, like Danny, Tully wore the fire-darkened tin stars of a captain. ‘I’ll have to salute the little bastard,’ Gooch complained.

Harkaway smiled. ‘You’ll
all
have to salute me,’ he said.

Grobelaar had become a second-lieutenant and the Somali women had washed and pressed their clothes and there had been a great deal of boot polishing. Even Abdillahi had been promoted to sergeant-major by means of a coat of arms cut from a Tate and Lyle Golden Syrup tin and attached to an old watch strap to wear on his wrist. It didn’t appeal as much as the stripes he’d worn but Harkaway explained that he was more important now and gave him two of the Maria Theresa dollars to prove it.

‘What will you do with them?’ he asked.

‘Buy camels, effendi.’ The Somali smiled. ‘I will be a rich man.’

‘You could also be killed.’

‘Paradise, effendi, has gardens where the faithful recline on divans attended by lovely women. There are many fountains.’

‘Sounds all right.’

‘It is a desert dweller’s heaven, effendi.’

At the first opportunity Danny drew Harkaway to one side. What had happened above the gorge before Barracca’s defeat had made her hope for a future but suddenly she felt there could never be one with Harkaway. He was too absorbed in what he was doing and she had a feeling that there was little room for her in his plans.

‘After Bidiyu, George?’ she asked. ‘Then what?’

He touched her hand, then his fingers moved up her arm to squeeze the soft flesh above her elbow.

‘For a while, nothing,’ he said. ‘Rest and recuperate. Get the Boys into shape.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of the Boys,’ she said. ‘I was thinking of us. What do
we
get out of it?’

He looked at her. ‘Life,’ he said. ‘There’s been too much death lately.’

‘There’ll be women in Bidiyu.’

He shrugged. ‘Most women have minds like frightened mice and think only in terms of homes and children. You’ve proved yourself bigger than that.’

She wasn’t sure she had. Her thoughts seemed to be exactly the same as other women’s and only circumstances had moved them from their natural path. But she hadn’t the courage to say so, for fear of losing him.

‘So what happens?’ she asked.

He grinned. ‘Champagne, for a start. I’ll be surprised if we don’t find some. Then the biggest bed we can find. Canopied, the posts silver maidens wearing no more clothing than would make a decent table-napkin.’

She was aware that he was appealing to her physical instincts.

‘You’d never find me in the dark,’ she said. ‘Besides, I’d be scared stiff.’

‘Not you,’ he said. ‘You’re more of a woman than you realize. You’ve heard of the colonel’s lady and Rosie O’Grady being sisters under the skin. For years you’ve been repressed by those milksops at that mission of yours with their bloody prayer meetings. This is Africa, love-making here’s conducted with barbaric splendour. I’ll have you serenaded with cymbals and drums to bed in a room filled with oriental scents.’

‘You make me feel like the sort of woman Paddy Tully’s looking for.’

‘Tully,’ he said, ‘is dirt.’ He bent and kissed her, his hand roving over the curve of her behind. ‘I’ll show you what love-making really is.’

So far, she thought, her nerves tingling, her stomach full of butterflies, she had not known love at all. Her fiancé -centuries ago now - had been too stiff and pompous to make more than cautious passes at her, and at the mission there had been only shy glances that had merely bored her. Only the hot-eyed Italian doctor who had noticed her in Abyssinia had roused any feeling in her. She had often regretted rejecting him.

She slapped Harkaway’s hand away. ‘My backside doesn’t provide free roosting for the hands of anybody who chooses to make it so,’ she said.

He laughed. ‘You love it. You’ve been starved all your life of it. Just give me a few hours to sort out the Italians and I’ll be with you.’

As she watched him stalk away, his head in the air, his back ramrod-straight, she wondered which he considered more important.

Di Sanctis watched the last of the lorries roar through the marketplace of Bidiyu for the west.

The few Italians who remained with him were finishing the last of the coffee in endless small cups to hide their misery. Cigarettes had disappeared and they were using raw leaf from Ethiopia which was so strong some people had to lie down before lighting it.

Di Sanctis frowned. The troops he’d been left were unreliable. Desertion was appalling, and newly recruited askaris wearing thinly disguised Italian tunics were appearing in the fields, while the native bandas, a motley collection at the best of times, had not been seen for days.

Turning on his heel, he re-entered the headquarters building. On Guidotti’s desk was a cable which had arrived that morning from Rome. Ironically, just as Bidiyu was about to be given up, the Duce had wired his congratulations on the resistance they were putting up.

Di Sanctis scowled at it and poured himself a stiff brandy. As he replaced the glass on the table, the door opened. In the entrance was a girl. She had a light olive skin with a velvety bloom and an exquisitely moulded face with black liquid eyes. She wore a maroon silk robe with blue and white flowers painted on it, a thin shawl of gauzy silk with gold embroidery, and a gold necklace and earrings.

‘They’ve all gone,’ he said.

‘E cosi la vita.’

Di Sanctis put the gramophone on, playing the nostalgic
‘Un Giorno Ti Diro’.
He was thinking of his native Naples.

The girl touched his hand and he turned and smiled at her.
‘Andiamo,’
he said.

Upstairs, they headed for his room but then he decided to use Guidotti’s. Previously he had always had to smuggle her in but he was the governor now and should use the governor’s apartments. At the last moment, however, he found he hadn’t the nerve and headed instead for Piccio’s room. Over the bed there was a picture of a smiling Italian soldier, naked except for his steel helmet. He was looking at a woman who was also naked, and the look in their eyes spoke worlds.
Il
Taverno degli Dimenticati,
it was called. The Tavern of the Forgotten.

Di Sanctis turned to find the girl quietly unfastening her dress. He stared at her for a moment, suddenly frightened and full of bitterness, and, reaching out to the neck of the dress, he wrenched it from her.

She stood in front of him, naked, her expression half-wild, half-timid, a tribal woman ready to obey her man. Di Sanctis stared at her for a moment, then, as the tears began to stream down his cheeks, she reached out to him, crooning
- ‘Tesoro, Tesoro,’
words she’d heard him use to her - and pulling him to her, held him closely, her free hand lifting to the buttons of his shirt.

When Di Sanctis woke, the girl was sitting on the hard Arab pillow at the foot of the bed. As he lifted his head she smiled and moved towards him, but he pushed her aside. Today, he knew, he had things to do.

Before midday the urgency of action was impressed on him. Radio messages from Guidotti showed that he’d managed to escape. He and his column had passed through the cleared Wirir Gorge without incident and had turned north to the Abyssinian border. Up there at Djuba, Fort San Rafaelo, mud-walled and white-washed, still flew the red, white and green tricolour of Italy.

So much for the Duce’s Africa Orientale! Di Sanctis’s eyes prickled as he wondered what he had ever seen in the posturing ass in Rome who liked to parade in a swimming costume on Italian beaches, showing his deep chest and pretending he was as young and virile as he ever was, when everybody knew he was on the verge of sixty. Why hadn’t he stopped when he’d had the whole of Italy in his palm?

Dressing carefully, he called on the Mayor to instruct him to have his officials ready on the steps of Guidotti’s headquarters when they saw the British approaching.

‘When will they arrive?’ The Mayor was a small fat man and he was nervous.

‘God willing, tomorrow. With luck the day after. With incredible good fortune, two days from now.’ Di Sanctis’s expression changed. ‘However, if they do what I expect they will do, it will be this afternoon. You will have the police in position and there will be order. The band of the 49th Native Infantry will play as they enter. Do you know anything British they could be taught quickly?’

‘ “God Save the King!” I heard it in the last war.’

‘Go and see the bandmaster.’

As the Mayor hurried off, Di Sanctis interviewed the Chief of Police and then his own deputy, Captain - until the previous afternoon when Di Sanctis had promoted him to give himself some sort of strength, Sottotenente - Rudio.

‘There will be a guard of honour, Rudio,’ he said. ‘Pick them from your most reliable men. Let us surrender like soldiers.’

During the afternoon news arrived that a column of vehicles was heading towards the town from the direction of Jijiga. Di Sanctis sighed and called Rudio. ‘Have the armoured car brought round,’ he said. ‘We shall need a white bed-sheet - attached to a long pole, and a man to hold it.’

Putting on his jacket and cap, he went upstairs to where the girl was still waiting. She was still sitting on the hard pillow at the foot of the bed, almost as if she hadn’t moved, as if she were made of black ivory.

‘I am going,’ Di Sanctis said. ‘After that, I don’t know what will happen.’

She nodded slowly, but made no attempt to say goodbye. Di Sanctis touched her shoulder then turned and left the room. She was still there as he closed the door. She’d been faithful to him for three years now, gentle, kind, affectionate, never disputing his wishes. He wondered what would happen to her.

Accompanied by two staff cars, the armoured car headed slowly out of the city.

They saw the first of the lorries eight miles outside, coming down the slopes in a long line past the kilometre markers the Italians had so laboriously set up. Even at that distance, Di Sanctis could see the lorries were all captured Italian Lancias and he could hardly believe they had so many.

Because Di Sanctis, in the manner of Continentals, was driving on the right side of the road and the oncoming vehicles, in the manner of the barbarian British, were driving on the left, they were approaching each other face-to-face. For a moment Di Sanctis wondered if he should swing to the left and he saw the driver eyeing him for instructions. But changing sides seemed to be humiliating himself unnecessarily.

‘Carry on,’ he said, but as he spoke there was a burst of firing from the foremost lorry. The driver slammed on the brakes at once and dived for the ditch with the corporal holding the flag. For a second, Di Sanctis tried to maintain a little dignity in the face of his enemies, but the bullets were whack-whacking overhead and he realized he was being stupid and dived after the other two.

The lorries had stopped. Seeing black faces, Di Sanctis realized they were the notorious Sixth Column which had destroyed Barracca and humiliated them again and again on their own ground with their own weapons. For a moment, angrily, he wished he had guns, but he had come unarmed and he saw no alternative to Guidotti’s arrangements. He snatched at the white flag and started to wave it violently.

‘Get up, Corporal,’ he said, and together the two of them scrambled from the ditch.

Trying to retain his dignity, Di Sanctis strode forward, his back straight, his head up, while the Italian corporal who carried the flag hurried along behind him, changing feet as he tried to pick up the step.

A man descended from the first lorry. His shorts and shirt were faded but clean and pressed, his boots were polished and his stockings were without a wrinkle. On his shoulders were the cloth stars and crowns of a lieutenant-colonel, and on his head he wore a stained British officer’s dress cap. On his belt he wore a webbing holster containing a revolver, and he held an Italian Biretta sub-machine gun. Behind him there were two other white men and then Di Sanctis saw the woman. She wore a uniform of sorts with the shoulder insignia of an officer and she reminded him achingly of the girl he’d just left in Bidiyu. She was tall and slender in the same way, her hair cropped short like a native girl’s, and she carried no arms.

The man with the colonel’s badges made a sign and Di Sanctis saw another man also wearing the stars of an officer climbing from the driver’s seat of the front lorry. The tall man stepped forward accompanied by an armed Somali with bushy hair and the face of a god. ‘I would like to arrange terms for the surrender of Bidiyu,’ Di Sanctis said. His voice came out as a squeak and he cleared his throat and started again.