The Mercenaries (13 page)

The beer was warm and synthetic, however, and the stench in the narrow medieval streets appalling, and Sammy seemed awed by the place.

‘There are such a lot of the bastards, Ira,’ he said. ‘What’d happen if they decided they didn’t want us?’

As the days passed, they began to grow bored with having nothing to do and occasionally they begged shaggy ponies from the pupil pilots who kept them in Kailin for their personal transport, or borrowed dubious guns and got themselves rowed out into the Yung Ling Lakes, a string of bright pools just to the south that were separated by strips of marsh and reed. The lakes were the home of countless snipe, woodcock, duck and geese which rose in honking hordes into the blood-red sunsets as they pulled the triggers, great islands of what at first had seemed weeds lifting uncertainly along the edges with the beat of wings and the spattering of webbed feet on water, until the sky was black with circling birds.

Despite his boast, Fagan, always the sad impostor, wasn’t any more gifted with a gun than he was with an aeroplane, and even his shooting seemed dogged by farce. When he almost blew Ellie’s head off in his excitement she turned on him in savage disgust and swung at him with the soggy corpse of a duck she was just lifting from the water, and he disappeared overboard with a splash and a hoot of giggling laughter from the Chinese boatman. He returned to the bungalow, noisily indignant and sour-faced, and the following day when Ira wasn’t looking he sneaked into the air with the Fokker and set off east to look for Kwei’s legendary balloon. He’d been talking for some time about it, itching to do it some damage, and he returned in such a flurry of excitement to tell them he’d found it, he overshot the inadequate field and dropped his nose into the ditch at the end.

Ira’s fury did nothing to damp his enthusiasm. ‘As God’s me judge, I saw it,’ he explained loudly, wiping away the blood where he’d banged his nose on the dashboard. ‘Like a bladder of lard it looked, and with so many patches, you’d only have to stick a pin it in to deflate it.’

For a fortnight, apart from throwing a rope over the Fokker’s tail and dragging it off to the hangars to remove the stump of propeller, they did little at the airfield except organise strange games of polo with the pupil-pilots, which came to an abrupt end when Fagan, showing off his prowess as a rider, inevitably got himself kicked by one of the shaggy ponies. They had just helped him to the office in the barrack block when, to their surprise, one of the cars from Tsu’s cavalcade arrived. In the rear seat was the Baptist General himself, wearing a woollen gown and a bowler hat and huddled against the cool wind in an expensive sable fur. Lao and Kee were with him, and Yang arrived soon afterwards in another car, still thunderous with rage.

Lao seemed to have accepted that most of the machines they had so laboriously assembled were never going to fly, but he still seemed concerned about the summer campaigning.

Carefully, Ira explained that a pupil-pilot would need around ten hours of flying instruction before he was even capable of taking up an aeroplane alone and that not even then would he be capable of giving battle, not even with General Kwei’s unarmed balloon.

‘If the General’s so keen,’ he said, ‘what’s wrong with Captain Yang?’

Lao suddenly didn’t seem to think much of Captain Yang and offered them two hundred American dollars for the destruction of the balloon.

‘Let’s be havin’ that down on paper,’ Fagan suggested eagerly. ‘I know where it is.’

Ira shook his head stubbornly, not retreating an inch. ‘It’s no good,’ he explained to Lao. ‘Before we can do a thing, you’ve got to find tools and spares.’

He was fighting for elementary safety, even here in this God-forsaken place where there were no airworthy planes and even less in the way of spare parts.

‘We even need a windsock,’ he said firmly. ‘And there’s no ground organisation whatsoever, no transport, no engineering sheds, no coolies, no equipment, nothing. I’m not going to let anyone up into the air--neither your pupils nor any of the people who came with me--until we find a field bigger and flatter than this to fly from.’

It rained during the night, a heavy downpour that changed the beaten dust of the field into a bog, and the following morning, with the earth steaming under the sun’s rays and the early spring scents making themselves felt, Ira arrived to find an army of coolies had already been mustered from somewhere by Lao. He had been hunting through the go-downs along the bund in the hope of unearthing a few of their possessions and appeared late, frustrated and furious, to find things transformed.

Already the maize in the next field had been trampled flat and trees were being dragged away, while earth was being packed into the ditch between from baskets that were passed down a long column of men and women snaking across the field herded by a line of shabby soldiers with ancient Martini rifles.

‘What in God’s name’s going on?’ he asked.

Sammy grinned. ‘They’re going to join the two fields,’ he said. ‘It was Lao’s idea.’

Ira stared at the horde of blue-clad figures, some of them convicts with heavy wooden collars round their necks, pushing barrows and chopping at the earth, barelegged yellow ants with straw hats and strange medieval tools, hacking civilisation yard by yard with their hands from the ground itself, under the direction of Lieutenant Kee, who appeared to be taking his orders from Sammy. Hundreds more men were working at the other side of the ditch, rank after rank of them, digging and shovelling to the sound of a prearranged rhythm.

‘What about the owner of the maize?’ he asked.

Sammy shrugged, unconcerned. ‘It didn’t look as though he was getting much compensation,’ he said. ‘They marched him off between two soldiers.’

Lao was waiting for them with Yang as they returned to the battered Bessoneaux.

‘You are pleased?’ he asked, smiling.

‘Yes,’ Ira said. ‘Now,’ he went on briskly, ‘we shall need transport ‘

Lao’s face fell. ‘You are difficult to satisfy. Major Penaluna,’ he said bitterly.

Ira grinned. ‘I’m asking for the barest essentials,’ he pointed out cheerfully. ‘Lorries are among them. I want at least one. We can probably make that other old wreck work if we can find some tyres. And I want a car. So far we’re having to use rickshaws or ponies to get out to the field, and none of them are very fast.’

‘There aren’t any cars in Hwai-Yang,’ Yang snapped. This isn’t Shanghai.’

Ira smiled at him. ‘Then you’d better let us have yours,’ he suggested. ‘I also want a couple of good carpenters, and one or two intelligent coolies to work with the aircraft.’

Lao pulled a face but he agreed, and that afternoon Sammy pushed and chivvied half a dozen wriggling young Chinese into the hut where Ira had set up the beginnings of a flight office and was scowling at the creased, dirty, rat-gnawed, dogeared scraps of paper that Yang called inspection sheets and log books. Behind the three youths were two older Chinese and Sammy had made them all laugh somehow and they were giggling and good-humoured and not a bit like the inscrutable Chinese they’d been led to expect.

‘Carpenters,’ Sammy said gaily. ‘Wang Li-Jen. Yen Hsu. The kids are coolies for the aircraft.’

Wang had a picture of King George torn from a magazine tacked to his shirt. ‘Wang work for Blitish,’ he explained, jabbing a dirty thumb at the portrait. This Blitish Number One Joss Man. Plenchee good for Wang.’

Fagan arrived late in a bad temper and with a monumental hangover. He and Ellie had been fighting during the night, and Ira wasn’t surprised to find him stamping about like a cyclone in a barrel, chewing at a cigar.

‘I’d shoot that bloody Yang if I was the Pride of the Missionaries.’ he said. ‘He’s never done a thing round here except maybe fart ‘Annie Laurie’ through a keyhole now and then like Paddy’s pig. We should all pack up and bugger off home. The pubs’ll just be openin’ in O’Connell Street.’

Ira glanced quickly at Ellie, half-hoping she’d agree on the spot, but she frowned and made a slicing angry gesture with her hand. ‘We can’t afford to go home,’ she said in a low voice, and Fagan gave his yelp of laughter and pointed at her.

‘Sure, females are queer things with their wee womany worries,’ he said brutally. ‘She’s been dreein’ her weird about havin’ a house for the first time in her life. She wants to hang up some curtains or something.’

Ellie said nothing, standing with her fists clenched, as though he set every nerve in her body on edge.

‘
Somebody’
ll have to go and see Kowalski,’ Ira pointed out. ‘I’ve got a list as long as your arm of things we need. We can screw a note out of Lao authorising it all.’ He glanced hopefully at Fagan, hoping he’d jump at the chance. Once at the coast, he suspected, he’d board the first boat home.

The thought seemed to have occurred to Fagan, too, and he threw away his cigar. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, and Ellie turned on him immediately. In the extraordinary love-hate relationship that existed between them, she couldn’t stand him near her half the time yet she also couldn’t trust him out of her sight.

‘Hell, don’t look so egg-bound,’ Fagan said. ‘Somebody’s got to go. Himself has said so, hasn’t he, and there’s too much bloody domestic bliss around here all of a sudden.’

She stared at him for a moment, while Ira, knowing her habit of blunt, vituperative response, held his breath. Then the spirit seemed to drain out of her. ‘O.K.,’ she said quietly. ‘You go. I guess I’ll stay here. I want to stay. I have a house. I’ve never had a house before.’

Ira turned to her. ‘Don’t you want to go?’ he asked her. ‘Not with him,’ she said flatly. ‘He’ll only get drunk.’

Ira stared after Fagan, who was already striding towards the office, imagining him disappearing over the horizon with their money, their good name, and their last chance of making anything worth while of this ridiculous pantomime of a training school.

‘Will he come back?’ he asked uneasily.

She considered the question for a second and he saw her face become suddenly brighter, and realised she was looking forward to shedding some of her responsibility for a few days. ‘I guess so,’ she said simply. ‘He needs me.’

Getting rid of Fagan was like pulling a thorn out of an aching heel.

He got drunk the night before he left, less with the alcohol than with the thought that he was about to be free for a while of his responsibilities and the brooding, dangerous Ellie, and he was noisy and laughing and already giving the glad eye to a young and not too plain missionary on the Fan-Ling who was on her way down the Yangtze on the first leg of her journey home to the States.

Nobody said anything, but there was a marked sense of relief as the
Fan-Ling
disappeared from sight, and on the way back into town, by mutual consent they found a small scrubbed restaurant with spidery benches like Tang woodcuts and tables that had been worn and polished for centuries. It was full of chattering girls, bright as butterflies in their silk jackets and fringed trousers, all presided over by a middle-aged woman wearing a pair of corsets that stretched from bust to thigh, outside her dress. She seemed surprised to see Ellie and it dawned on them at last that they were in a brothel.

But, although the waiter’s hands were more notable for the length of the nails than for their cleanliness, the food was good and, with Chinese courtesy, no one seemed to mind. They nodded to the girls’ customers moving in and out past their table and, as the mistake and the samshui set them laughing, someone produced an orchestra of horns, gongs and one-stringed fiddles, and Sammy, outdoing Fagan for lunacy, got them playing for dancing. They cleared the tables and pulled the girls forward, and started a noisy free-for-all in the middle of the floor, Sammy bringing the house down as he tried to teach the shrieking Madame how to dance the foxtrot. The evening became a celebration, with the room crowded and dozens of grinning heads jammed round the door to see what was going on.

‘Elevator Ellie, they called me on the fields back home,’ Ellie laughed. ‘I used to think they were complimenting me on my flying, but I found out later they were just being dirty-minded about my figure.’

With no Fagan to worry over, she drank a little too much, but it seemed to knock the props away from beneath her fears and frustrations, and she was noisy and unaffected, and when she said good night at the door of her bungalow she insisted on kissing them both before she disappeared.

Sammy stared after her, grinning as she weaved through the door. ‘She’ll probably have a hell of a head tomorrow,’ he said.

Ira nodded. They’d found it unexpectedly easy to make her laugh and. without Fagan on her mind, she was surprisingly attractive with bright eyes and colour in her cheeks, her grave expression changed for one of lunatic willingness to make a night of it.

‘If she does, she’ll probably feel better when it’s gone,’ he said. There’s nothing like a good drunk for kicking a few boards loose.’

Mei-Mei was waiting just inside the door for them. She seemed to be dressed in her best again, her face carefully made up, the flower behind her ear. She was smiling and deferential as usual.

‘Sammy, that girl worries me,’ Ira said.

‘
She
looks worried, too,’ Sammy agreed.

Outside their room, they paused and glanced back. Mei-Mei had followed them and was now waiting by the doorway.

‘She still looks worried,’ Sammy said again uncertainly. ‘Lor’, Ira, suppose--suppose’--he chuckled suddenly--’Ira, do you suppose that she’s just here for our pleasure?’

Ira turned.
‘Our pleasure?’

They do that sort of thing, don’t they? Lay down their wives for their friends and so on.’

Ira grinned. ‘She’s not married,’ he said. ‘Or is she?’

Sammy shrugged. ‘Tsu sent her. Perhaps she’s something in his yamen.’

‘We’d better ask her.’

Sammy hitched at his belt and put one hand confidently on Ira’s chest. ‘I’m better at the lingo than you are,’ he said firmly. ‘And if I’m right, I reckon three’ll be a crowd.’

The sun was bright and the scent of blossom was filling the house when Ira went to breakfast next morning. Without being able to explain why, he felt on top of the world suddenly, and to his surprise he could hear Ellie across the garden actually singing as she washed. Fagan’s departure seemed to have left them all lighter-hearted.