The Mercenaries (8 page)

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, wapped 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 B.M.W., 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. ‘If I say so,’ he said, ‘you’ll work for an Azerbaijan-Persian pansy. 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 B.M.W., which had spread its dark smears on his clothes and face. ‘Now get your bloody coats off! I want these machines flying.’

‘O.K., 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 flat 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.

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 noisiest, 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.

Sammy caught his eye and smiled back, an affectionate, genuine smile that was full of gaiety and natural human warmth. ‘She’s O.K.,’ he shouted as Ira closed the throttle. These B.M.W.’s are beauts. They even stand up to the sort of ill-treatment Fagan gave ‘em.’

‘Shove the engine cover on,’ Ira said switching off. ‘I’ll fly her.’

As he went with Sammy to the tent to fetch his helmet, Ellie climbed into the cockpit and sat for a second, jiggling the controls.

Those guys sure know motors,’ she said grudgingly. ‘She doesn’t sound like a load of scrap iron any more.’

Fagan watched her, shrewdly assessing the histrionic possibilities of the situation ‘Take her up, Ellie,’ he urged. ‘Show ‘em what you can do.’

She stared at him for a moment, then she nodded. ‘Swing her,’ she said. ‘He wanted to know if I could fly. I’ll show him I can.’

As the B.M.W. fired, Ira’s head appeared immediately from the tent. Ellie was wearing neither coat nor helmet, but she was waving the chocks away and, as he ran out, followed by Sammy, the little machine sped across the field, dust and scraps of chaff flying upwards in the propeller wash, one of the coolies running after it, trying vainly to lasso the tail with a rope and screaming, ‘Mastah! Peng Ah-Lun! Fly machine escape! ‘

As Ira came to a stop, she pulled the machine up in a steep turn, the ace-of-clubs tail wagging, and began to climb sharply, the wings shimmering and translucent in the sun. until she was about three thousand feet up, then she stalled, the wings glinting, fell off in a dive and turned towards the tent. The engine buzzed like a hornet as she came over them, pulling up so low it set the tent flapping and heaving against its guys.

For a quarter of an hour she treated them to a display which proved without any doubt her ability to fly an aeroplane, then she set the Fokker gently down again and taxied towards the tent. Fagan was grinning all over his face, enjoying the fury in Ira’s eyes. Sammy, knowing better, watched cautiously and kept out of the way.

Ellie jumped briskly out of the cockpit and walked towards them, then her smile died as she saw Ira’s expression.

‘Well,’ she said, suddenly hostile again. ‘Wasn’t it good enough?’

‘What the hell did it prove?’ Ira demanded.

‘That I can fly a goddam ship,’ she snapped back. ‘That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’

‘We’d accepted that,’ Ira snorted. ‘You didn’t have to pull the wings off it to prove it.’

She stared back at him, and abruptly the arrogance went from her eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said shortly. ‘I guess I shouldn’t have.’

There’s a roster board in the tent,’ Ira growled, his temper subsiding. ‘In future we stick to it.’

As he turned away, she stood watching him for a moment, her eyes hurt, then Fagan laughed his shrill laugh.

‘Steady, the Buffs,’ he said. ‘Don’t let it get you down, old girl. It’s only the old Service working itself out of his system.’ She was still staring after Ira and she turned on him like a tiger. ‘Shut up,’ she snapped.

Fagan’s face fell and he gave a wild gesture. ‘Listen, all I said...’

Ellie stared at him with contempt. ‘You say too goddam much,’ she said. ‘You always did!‘

Before the next week was out, all three machines were serviceable and Ira took them up in turn to satisfy himself they were properly rigged and the engines firing firmly.

Fagan, restless and lacking in concentration, seemed bewildered by the precautions he was taking. ‘Will you, for the love of God, give over?’ he complained. ‘We all know how to make emergency landings. We can set ‘em down if the engine cuts. It’s just that they’re heavy on the controls, that’s all. You have to use a bit of strength with ‘em.’

To prove his point, he insisted on taking up the Albatros, but his taxying was wild and almost removed the tail of the Avro; and his take-off, while it was as spectacular as Ellie’s, was not nearly as skilled. Clearly not intending to be outdone by her, he stalled, dived and spun the old machine until Ira’s hair stood on end and finally brought her down in an uncontrolled landing that was far too fast so that he had to apply rudder to avoid hitting the lorry. He swung wildly at the last moment to send all the coolies running for their lives, and sliced with his wing-tip through the frayed guy-ropes of one of the tents so that the whole lot came down across the tail of the machine.

‘Ach, well,’ he said with maddening cheerfulness, as they untangled the torn canvas from his elevators and rudder, ‘what’s a little mistake between friends?’

Sammy eyed him as he swaggered away. ‘This geezer’s dangerous, Ira,’ he observed. ‘They’re
both
dangerous. They’ve got the look of doom on ‘em, and they’ll finish us between ‘em.’

The loss of the tent and the hair-raising display of flying had been enough to make Ira decide that something would have to be done about Fagan, but before he could get him on one side to tell him loudly and clearly what he thought of him, a spectacular quarrel developed between Fagan and Ellie and, before they knew what was happening, he was in one of his fits of heavy self-deprecation and the dinner party they’d planned to celebrate the fact that they were finished turned into another of his disasters, as his usual aggressive hostility followed the bottle.

As they tried to get him out to a taxi, all the old resentments against Ira burst out in bitter reproach. ‘Why should he always be tellin’ me what to do?’ he said to Ellie. ‘Why should he be running the show?’

The argument was a repetition of a dozen others they’d heard and Ellie’s face was hot and resentful. ‘Maybe it’s because he’s run other shows before,’ she pointed out sharply, and Fagan gave a hoot of rage.