Scruffy - A Diversion (35 page)

Not that Lovejoy couldn’t from time to time drink himself into a state verging upon total inebriation, but it called for, as has been indicated, an occasion, a piece of bad news, a piece of good news, a great joy, a great sorrow. Such a happening was about to be visited upon the Sergeant and one which strangely enough managed to combine the two opposites—and this was his wedding to Miss Constance Boddy. He would be exchanging one kind of companionship for another, happiness and sadness thus would walk hand in hand.

Lovejoy felt no qualms of conscience at the idea he was contemplating of enjoying one final bang-up party. He was entitled to it both as a bachelor about to embark on a matrimonial voyage and as a man bidding farewell to spirits. The calamity that befell him was that he found it incumbent upon him to take leave of each one individually.

And the sad thing was that it happened not on the evening that Sergeant Lovejoy had intended it should, which was before the day when he would present himself with his bride-to-be to the Chaplain and which he had set aside for just this purpose with three of his best friends and drinking companions in the regiment, but several nights previous, and shamefully alone in the Admiral Nelson with none other than Treugang Ramirez.

Sheer chance, coupled with the dogged persistence with which Treugang Ramirez had clung to Sergeant Lovejoy as a source of information about the apes, paid off in the most unexpected manner and gave the little home-grown saboteur his long-awaited opportunity to deal the death blow to the morale of the British garrison as well as the civilians marooned on the Rock.

For the secret that there were now but two apes left, that all efforts to import them in quantity from Africa had failed and that the British were pinning their hopes on one obstreperous, cantankerous and obstructionist monkey mating with a total stranger he had not laid eyes upon up to a fortnight before, had remained a secret indeed.

The two Intelligence officers, Majors McPherson and Clyde, had done a highly creditable job in tightening up security where the apes were concerned and putting forth counter-propaganda. Since the construction of Tim’s cages by the apes’ village and the closing of the area by troops, no one could get close enough to verify how many apes there were.

Thus, the source of information upon which the German propaganda machine was relying from inside the Rock was dried up. Their broadcasts continued in the same vein, but lacked the venom, bounce and conviction of the earlier ones. Counter-propaganda put out by Clyde, McPherson and Co. had the ape pack flourishing again and breeding normally, and these fables were generally accepted on the Rock, but the situation was tenuous in the extreme.

Although the troops guarding the cages were a picked lot and sworn to secrecy one of them might blab and reveal the true situation. Or some officious secretary might remind the Prime Minister of the signal sent to the Rock with regard to keeping the apes up to strength and suggest that perhaps the P.M. would wish to see how these had been carried out. This would loose an official inquiry. What they needed was a bona fide ape birth on the Rock with the publication of an equally bona fide photograph of mother and child. Bluff wouldn’t do in this instance, Major Clyde recognized. It had to be the real thing. Major Clyde was certain that if he could produce this birth upon the Rock, a genuine one, genuinely substantiated, the Germans would cease to credit their own propaganda and would begin to believe
his.
The campaign would be considered a failure; the agents who could be better used in other projects would be called in and the funds cut off. Within three months, thus unhampered, the British would be able to instigate an ape hunt in Africa and within a short time begin the importing of Macaques in fresh numbers to avert not only the immediate danger, but to satisfy any nosey-parker questioners in Parliament as well. It was subtle, long-range thinking and planning, all held up and being brought to nought by probably the only time in the entire history of the primates when the biological urge hadn’t done so.

Thus while there was still a gleam of hope that it might work before it was too late, it was wholly unforeseen misfortune that Sergeant Lovejoy should drop into the Admiral Nelson at a time when it was usually deserted, ten o’clock in the evening, to find Treugang Ramirez lurking there nursing a beer. It had been a continuing ten-day lurk for Ramirez, always waiting, always hoping, for Lovejoy had not visited his favourite pub, or any other pub for that matter, ever since he had arrived back at the Rock with Miss Constance Boddy and Amelia.

Nor was there any back-sliding or mischief inherent in the visit of Lovejoy. He had not come to sneak a drink, but to have a word with the proprietor as to the bachelor party and farewell to spirits he intended to stage two nights hence. For with a sense of tact and fitness newly acquired since his association with Miss Boddy he had no intention of being caught falling down drunk in the public bar, and so had come to engage a private room for himself and three of his regular cronies where they could enjoy their evening away from prying eyes.

At the entrance of the Sergeant, Ramirez had to look twice to make sure that it was the same man, for Lovejoy wore not the usual rumpled and stained denims which was his ape uniform, but clean ones, the trousers creased to knife-sharp edge, his hair properly cut and his cap set at the smart Rock angle. On his sleeve gleamed the three chevrons newly sewn there by a woman’s hand. It was not the old Gunner Lovejoy who had entered but a brand-new Sergeant Lovejoy.

But once he had taken in the apparition it didn’t take Treugang long to twig. “Sergeant,” he cried, “Sergeant Lovejoy. What a surprise! You have been promoted! Have I not always said you deserved it? Congratulations, oh, a thousand congratulations!”

“Oh,” grunted Sergeant Lovejoy, “it’s you.” Ramirez leaning up against the bar grasping a beer was a reminder of the bad old days, or the good old days, whichever way one chose to regard the matter.

The Sergeant now addressed the barman, “Boss in, Joe?”

The barman paused only long enough in his eternal polishing of the bar to reply, “Back in half an hour. Had to see a man.”

Sergeant Lovejoy consulted his watch. It had just gone ten. Then ten-thirty or shortly after would see him in plenty of time to discharge an errand or two and drive up to Ferdinand’s Battery to take over the midnight-to-eight watch over the non-goings-on between Scruffy and Amelia. He and Major Bailey had a thorough understanding as to the importance of the operation, but didn’t fuss over the matter of a few minutes. Tim departed promptly at the stroke of midnight. Lovejoy arrived simultaneously or a minute or so later. Several times their cars had passed on the road, one going up and one going down.

“I’ll wait,” said Sergeant Lovejoy.

The barman nodded, “What will it be?” He wagged his head in the direction of the new stripes and added, “It’s on the house. The boss would want it.”

“No, no, no,” cried Treugang Ramirez. “Let me, Sergeant, it’s my treat! Your promotion! Let me buy.”

It wasn’t the fact that not one but two free libations were offered that led Lovejoy to succumb, but because it was too complicated to explain. In a pub whose upkeep he had helped to maintain for some ten years, a man with newly-sewn Sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve was most certainly entitled to one at the expense of the management, and Lovejoy would have had to confess that he was on the verge of taking the pledge which would have called for humiliating details. Lovejoy was not yet ready to have his impending nuptials broadcast about the Rock nor the fact that it was bound up with total abstention. Hence he would nurse a drink or two, the boss would return, he would make his arrangements and no palaver would be involved.

Ramirez permitted himself the liberty of fingering the new stripes and said, “I am as proud as if it was myself. We will drink to this. What will you have, Sergeant?”

The barman cut in, “First drink for the Sergeant on the house like I said. You can buy later. What’ll it be, Sarge?”

Now it had been on Lovejoy’s mind to ask for a Monkey Juice— Guinness and lime—and nurse it, secure in the knowledge that he would take no harm from it, but there was something, unfortunately, in this offer of a drink on the house which precluded this.

The house would be offended if he called for anything but the best. “I’ll have a double whisky,” said the Sergeant.

“I’ll have the same,” called Treugang Ramirez, and when the barman looked at him slipped a ten-shilling note on the bar. “To drink the Sergeant’s health,” he added. “Mine is the next.”

With one more in the offing Lovejoy saw no need to nurse the one the barman had set up for him. For full enjoyment he liked to knock it back, feel the shock of its arrival down below followed by the spreading glow. He knocked it back. Treugang Ramirez did likewise. The barman took a sip of water, raising his glass towards Lovejoy and saying, “Cheer-ho, Sarge.”

“Now my turn,” cried Ramirez. “Two more doubles.”

“Two more doubles,” echoed the barman and set them up.

Lovejoy saw no need to nurse that one either since the aforementioned etiquette and protocol now called for him to invest in a third round. He knocked back the second, as did Ramirez.

Ordinarily two double whiskies would not have turned a single grey hair of Lovejoy’s head, or brought so much as a bead of perspiration to his lip, and the Sergeant had no reason to fear its effects. Alas, familiar as he was with the physiology of the Barbary ape, he was less acquainted with that of
homo sapiens.
He had forgotten that except for the one bender at Hope Cove he had just come through weeks of total abstinence, and furthermore he had not the faintest notion of the metabolic changes brought about by emotional strains, or their unpredictability.

Sergeant Lovejoy thus got drunk quickly and thoroughly and perilously, and not far behind him followed Treugang Ramirez who was paying for it all. For he had had a momentary flash of cunning intuition which told him that the Sergeant would not have received his sergeant’s stripes for nothing. Ramirez meant to find out why and what it was for, and had no idea what a sterling start had been achieved through the two doubles.

Now the Sergeant was on his third double, and was well away.

The immediate result of these drinks was to muddle Lovejoy’s wits so that he became confused as to time, place and the relationship of past, present and future. It seemed to him that the final party he had come to arrange had already begun and that he was bidding his last farewell to all those flavours and jolts with which he had so long been familiar. And since there seemed to be no end to the generosity of his dear and good friend Treugang Ramirez, whom he now knew that he loved better than a brother, he began to mix his treats.

Farewell then to gin and its inseparable tonic, good-bye to Monkey Juice,
adieu
cognac,
adios
Bacardi,
auf wiedersehen
to wines red, white and pink, and good-bye likewise to Sergeant Lovejoy.

For the boss, catastrophically, didn’t return for over an hour, and by that time the damage was done. Into the interested and sympathetic ear of the barman and the thrilled and fascinated one of Treugang Ramirez, Lovejoy had spilled every last bean concerning himself, the non-existent ape pack, the fact that but two remained and the salvation of the Empire hung upon their immediate copulation.

To Treugang Ramirez, the inspired Nazi patriot, came the knowledge that he held in his hands now or never the opportunity to destroy the last two apes on the Rock, relay the news to the Germans and thereby break the British.

It was then that Ramirez most desperately deplored his cowardice with regard to fire-arms. Two well-placed shots from even a small pocket piece, granting that one could pierce the cordon of guards surrounding the area, and for the first time in over a hundred and fifty years the Rock would be without a single one of its good-luck mascots. Panic might well be expected to follow. His dismay would have been even greater had he known how close he was to a penetration of the forbidden zone, for at twenty-five minutes to twelve there came to Sergeant Lovejoy, now nine-tenths sozzled, and practically paralysed from the waist down, one of those awful moments of clarity which have been known to visit a drunken man shortly before a complete pass-out.

It began with an unexpected and short-lived unclouding of his vision which enabled Lovejoy to make out the time on the face of the bar-room clock and for it to penetrate that he was just twenty-five minutes away from having to steer his car up the mountain-side, utter the password, let himself into the caged area with his keys and begin the midnight-to-eight watch over Scruffy and Amelia.

Twelve o’clock midnight would soon be booming from all of the Gibraltar tower clocks; Major Tim Bailey would be sitting himself in his vehicle and departing the area: Sergeant Lovejoy would not be arriving. Neither his hands nor his legs were any longer his own. Any instant the fog of fumes would once more descend and becloud his brain and he would be caught absent from his post, derelict in his duty, drunk on guard and all the other concurrent crimes they could cook up against him.

But worse, the two apes would be alone and unwatched for eight hours until Major Bailey returned.

If, during that time, “it” happened, nobody would know. And if, as seemed much more likely, unobserved and unattended, Scruffy were to choose this period, free from surveillance, to kill Amelia, ape slaughter would be added to the list of crimes charged against the Sergeant. It was indeed a farewell party that somehow he had been inveigled into staging. Good-bye to his stripes, Miss Boddy and everything.

“Oh Gord,” groaned Sergeant Lovejoy. “Got to go! Apes! Midnight! My trick!” And then he repeated, “Oh Gord,” and added, “Legs no good.”

Nor indeed were they, for when he tried to arise from the table at which he had been sitting they buckled under him.

Treugang Ramirez was drunk too, but not all
that
drunk for he had managed surreptitiously to pour some drinks out and leave others half consumed in his determination to probe Lovejoy’s secrets. He was far tighter than he had ever been in his life before, but still able vaguely to cerebrate and function.