Honourable Schoolboy (54 page)

‘We’re about five hundred tons overweight. We’re leaking oil. We’re carrying an armed bodyguard. We’re forbidden to take off. We’re forbidden to land, Phnom Penh airport’s probably got a hole the size of Buckinghamshire. We have an hour and a half of Khmer Rouge between us and salvation, and if anybody turns sour on us the other end, ace operator Westerby is caught with his knickers round his ankles and about two hundred gunny bags of opium base in his arms.’

‘You know how to fly this thing?’ Charlie Marshall yelled, as he struck at a row of mildewed switches. ‘You some kinda great flying hero, Voltaire?’

‘I hate it all.’

‘Me too.’

Seizing a swat, Charlie Marshall flung himself upon a huge bottle-fly that was buzzing round the windscreen, then started the engines one by one, until the whole dreadful plane was heaving and rattling like a London bus on its last journey home up Clapham Hill. The radio crackled and Charlie Marshall took time off to give an obscene instruction to the control tower, first in Khmer and afterwards, in the best aviation tradition, in English. Heading for the far end of the runway, they passed a couple of gun emplacements and for a moment Jerry expected an overzealous crew to loose off at the fuselage, till in gratitude he remembered the army colonel and his lorries and his pay-off. Another bottle-fly appeared and this time Jerry took possession of the fly swat. The plane seemed to be gathering no speed at all, but half the instruments read zero so he couldn’t be sure. The din of the wheels on the runway seemed louder than the engines. Jerry remembered old Sambo’s chauffeur driving him back to school: the slow, inevitable progress down the Western by-pass toward Slough and finally Eton.

A couple of the hills men had come forward to see the fun and were laughing their heads off. A clump of palm trees came hopping toward them but the plane kept its feet firmly on the ground. Charlie Marshall absently pulled back the stick and retracted the landing gear. Uncertain whether the nose had really lifted, Jerry thought of school again, and competing in the long jump, and recalled the same sensation of not rising, yet ceasing to be on the earth. He felt the jolt and heard the swish of leaves as the underbelly cropped the trees. Charlie Marshall was screaming at the plane to pull itself into the damn air, and for an age they made no height at all, but hung and wheezed a few feet above a winding road which climbed inexorably into a ridge of hills. Charlie Marshall was lighting a cigarette so Jerry held the wheel in front of him and felt the live kick of the rudder. Taking back the controls, Charlie Marshall pointed the plane into a slow bank at the lowest point of the range. He held the turn, crested the range and went on to make a complete circle. As they looked down on the brown rooftops and the river and the airport, Jerry reckoned they had an altitude of a thousand feet. As far as Charlie Marshall was concerned, that was a comfortable cruising height, for now at last he took his hat off and, with the air of a man who had done a good job well, treated himself to a large glass of Scotch from the bottle at his feet. Below them dusk was gathering, and the brown earth was fading softly into mauve.

‘Thanks,’ said Jerry, accepting the bottle. ‘Yes, I think I might.’

Jerry kicked off with a little small-talk - if it is possible to talk small while you are shouting at the top of your voice.

‘Khmer Rouge just blew up the airport ammunition dump!’ he bellowed. ‘It is closed for landing and take-off.’

‘They did?’ For the first time since Jerry had met him, Charlie Marshall seemed both pleased and impressed.

‘They say you and Ricardo were great buddies.’

‘We bomb everything. We killed half the human race already. We see more dead people than live people. Plain of Jars, Da Nang, we’re such big damn heroes that when we die Jesus Christ going to come down personally with a chopper and fish us out the jungle.’

‘They tell me Ric was a great guy for business!’

‘Sure! He the greatest! Know how many offshore companies we got, me and Ricardo? Six. We got foundations in Liechtenstein, corporations in Geneva, we got a bank manager in the Dutch Antilles, lawyers, Jesus. Know how much money I got?’ He slapped his back pocket. ‘Three hundred US exactly. Charlie Marshall and Ricardo killed half the whole damn human race together. Nobody give us no money. My father killed the other half and he got plenty plenty money. Ricardo, he always got these crazy schemes always. Shell cases. Jesus. We’re going to pay the coons to collect up all the shell cases in Asia, sell ‘em for the next war!’ The nose dropped and he hauled it up again with a foul French oath. ‘Latex! We gotta steal all the latex out of Kampong Cham! We fly to Kampong Cham, we got big choppers, red crosses. So what do we do? We bring out the damn wounded. Hold still, you crazy bastard, hear me?’ He was talking to the plane again. In the nose cone, Jerry noticed a long line of bullet holes which had not been very well patched. Tear here, he thought absurdly. ‘Human hair. We were gonna be millionaires out of hair. All the coon-girls in the villages got to grow long hair and we’re going to cut it off and fly it to Bangkok for wigs.’

‘Who was it paid Ricardo’s debts so that he could fly for Indocharter?’

‘Nobody!’

‘Somebody told me it was Drake Ko.’

‘I never heard of Drake Ko. On my deathbed I tell my mother, my father: bastard Charlie, the General’s boy, he never heard of Drake Ko in his life.’

‘What did Ricardo do for Ko that was so special that Ko paid all his debts?’

Charlie Marshall drank some whisky straight from the bottle, then handed it to Jerry. His fleshless hands shook wildly whenever he took them off the stick, and his nose ran all the while. Jerry wondered how many pipes a day he was up to. He had once known a pied-noir Corsican hotelier in Luang Prabang who needed sixty to do a good day’s work. Captain Marshall never flies in the mornings, he thought.

‘Americans always in a hurry,’ Charlie Marshall complained, shaking his head. ‘Know why we gotta take this stuff to Phnom Penh now? Everybody impatient. Everybody want quickshot these days. Nobody got time to smoke. Everybody got to turn on quick. You wanta kill the human race, you gotta take time, hear me?’

Jerry tried again. One of the four engines had given up, but another had developed a howl as if from a broken silencer, so that he had to yell even louder than before.

‘What did Ricardo do for all that money?’ he repeated.

‘Listen, Voltaire, okay? I don’t like politics, I’m just a simple opium smuggler, okay? You like politics you go back below and talk to those crazy Shans. You can’t eat politics. You can’t screw politics. You can’t smoke politics. He tell my father.’

‘Who did?’

‘Drake Ko tell my father, my father tell me and me I tell the whole damn human race! Drake Ko some philosopher, hear me?’

For its own reasons the plane had begun falling steadily till it was a couple of hundred feet above the paddies. They saw a village and cooking fires burning and figures running wildly toward the trees, and Jerry wondered seriously whether Charlie Marshall had noticed. But at the last minute, like a patient jockey, he hauled and leaned and finally got the horse’s head up and they both had some more Scotch.

‘You know him well?’

‘Who?’

‘Ko.’

‘I never met him in my life, Voltaire. You wanna talk about Drake Ko, you go ask my father. He cut your throat.’

‘How about Tiu? - Tell me, who’s the couple with the pig?’ Jerry yelled, to keep the conversation going while Charlie took back the bottle for another pull.

‘Haw people, down from Chiang Mai. They worried about their lousy son in Phnom Penh. They think he too damn hungry so they take him a pig.’

‘So how about Tiu?’

‘I never heard of Mr Tiu, hear me?’

‘Ricardo was seen up in Chiang Mai three months ago,’ Jerry yelled.

‘Yeah, well Ric’s a damn fool,’ said Charlie Marshall with feeling. ‘Ric’s gotta keep his ass out of Chiang Mai or somebody shoot it right off. Anybody lying dead they gotta keep their damn mouth shut, hear me? I say to him: Ric, you my partner. Keep your damn mouth shut and your ass out of sight or certain people get personally pretty mad with you. ‘

The plane entered a raincloud and at once began losing height fast. Rain raced over the iron deck and down the insides of the windows. Charlie Marshall flicked some switches up and down, there was a bleeping from the controls panel and a couple of pinlights came on, which no amount of swearing could put out. To Jerry’s amazement they began climbing again, though in the racing cloud he doubted his judgment of the angle. Glancing behind him in order to check, he was in time to glimpse the bearded figure of the dark-skinned paymaster in the Fidel Castro cap retreating down the cabin ladder, holding his AK47 by the barrel. They continued climbing, the rain ended and the night surrounded them like another country. The stars broke suddenly above them, they jolted over the moonlit crevasses of the cloud tops, they lifted again, the cloud vanished for good, and Charlie Marshall put on his hat and announced that both starboard engines had now ceased to play any part in the festivities. In this moment of respite, Jerry asked his maddest question.

‘So where’s Ricardo now, sport? Got to find him, see. Promised my paper I’d have a word with him. Can’t disappoint them, can we?’

Charlie Marshall’s sleepy eyes had all but closed. He was sitting in a half-trance, with his head against the seat and the brim of his hat over his nose.

‘What that, Voltaire? You speak at all?’

‘Where is Ricardo now?’

‘Ric?’ Charlie Marshall repeated, glancing at Jerry in a sort of wonder. ‘Where Ricardo is, Voltaire?’

‘That’s it, sport. Where is he? I’d like to have an exchange of views with him. That’s what the three hundred bucks were about. There’s another five hundred if you could find the time to arrange an introduction.’

Springing suddenly to life, Charlie Marshall delved for the Candide and slammed it into Jerry’s lap while he delivered himself of a furious outburst.

‘I don’t know where Ricardo is ever, hear me? I never don’t want a friend in my life. If I see that crazy Ricardo I shoot his balls right off in the street, hear me? He dead. So he can stay dead till he dies. He tell everyone he got killed. So maybe for once in my life I’m going to believe that bastard!’

Pointing the plane angrily into the cloud, he let it fall toward the slow flashes of Phnom Penh’s artillery batteries to make a perfect three point landing in what to Jerry was pitch darkness. He waited for the burst of machine-gun fire from the ground defences, he waited for the sickening free-fall as they nose-dived into a mammoth crater, but all he saw, quite suddenly, was a newly assembled revetment of the familiar mud-filled ammunition boxes, arms open and palely lit, waiting to receive them. As they taxied toward it a brown jeep pulled in front of them with a green light winking on the back, like a flashlight being turned on and off by hand. The plane was humping over grass. Hard beside the revêtement Jerry could see a pair of green lorries, and a tight knot of waiting figures, looking anxiously toward them, and behind them the dark shadow of a twin-engined sports plane. They parked, and Jerry heard at once from the hold beneath their penthouse the creak of the nose cone opening, followed by the clatter of feet on the iron ladder and the quick call and answer of voices. The speed of their departure took him by surprise. But he heard something else that turned his blood cold, and made him charge down the steps to the belly of the plane.

‘Ricardo!’ he yelled. ‘Stop! Ricardo!’

But the only passengers left were the old couple clutching their pig and their parcel. Seizing the steel ladder, he let himself fall, jolting his spine as he hit the tarmac. The jeep had already left with the Chinese cooks and their Shan bodyguard. As he ran forward, Jerry could see the jeep racing for an open gateway at the perimeter of the airfield. It passed through, two sentries slammed the gates and took up their position as before. Behind him, the helmeted flight-handlers were already swarming toward the Carvair. A couple of lorryloads of police looked on and for a moment the western fool in Jerry was seduced into thinking they might be playing some restraining role, till he realised they were Phnom Penh’s guard-of-honour for a three-ton load of opium. But his main eye was for one figure only, and that was the tall bearded man with the Fidel Castro hat and the AK47 and the heavy limp that sounded like a hard-soft drumbeat as the rubber-soled flying boots hobbled down the steel ladder. Jerry saw him just. The door of the little Beechcraft waited open for him, and there were two ground-crew poised to help him in. As he reached them they held out their hands for the rifle but Ricardo waved them aside. He had turned and was looking for Jerry. For a second they saw each other. Jerry was falling and Ricardo was lifting the gun, and for twenty seconds Jerry reviewed his life from birth till now while a few more bullets ripped and whined round the battle-torn airfield. By the time Jerry looked up again the firing had stopped, Ricardo was inside the plane and his helpers were pulling away the chocks. As the little plane lifted into the flashes, Jerry ran like the devil for the darkest part of the perimeter before anybody else decided that his presence was obstructive to good trading.

Just a lovers’ tiff. he told himself, sitting in the cab, as he held his hands over his head and tried to damp down the wild shaking of his chest. That’s what you get for trying to play footsy-footsy with an old flame of Lizzie Worthington.

Somewhere a rocket fell and he didn’t give a damn.

He allowed Charlie Marshall two hours, though he reckoned one was generous. It was past curfew but the day’s crisis had not ended with the dark, there were traffic checks all the way to le Phnom and the sentries held their machine pistols at the ready. In the square, two men were screaming at each other by torchlight before a gathering crowd. Further down the boulevard, troops had surrounded a floodlit house and were leaning against the wall of it, fingering their guns. The driver said the secret police had made an arrest there. A colonel and his people were still inside with a suspected agitator. In the hotel forecourt, tanks were parked, and in his bedroom he found Luke lying on the bed drinking contentedly.