The Mercenaries (6 page)

Cigarettes in hand and still in blue suits and topees, Lawn and Geary were sucking with a desperation that suggested they were dehydrated at bottles of beer brought for them from ashore by a coolie in a sampan. They’d done remarkably little work, and Ira followed the American only after first taking the precaution of warning Sammy to be on his guard.

‘Stick with the machine, Sammy,’ he said. ‘Don’t let it out of your sight. And watch those two beauties. You know what to do even if they don’t.’

As he set off with Kowalski, a cool breeze was blowing along the bund between buildings and warehouses that stretched away in the long curve of the river, bringing with it the smell of drains and rotting vegetation and something else that was probably the odour of millions of unwashed bodies. On the opposite side was the shabby tangle of the Chinese town of Pootung with more wharves and warehouses, and out in the river, near the China Merchants’ Wharf, a British gunboat shaped like a flatiron swung at anchor, an odd-looking craft with a low freeboard and yellow-painted funnels. Under an awning, a couple of officers were drinking, surrounded by coolie servants, and just astern an old paddle steamer flew the pendant of the Senior Naval Officer of the station. A couple of junks barged past, the striped Chinese flag flapping, one cutting across the bows of the other, the crew cheering and beating gongs and letting off strings of fireworks, while the crew of the other chattered and danced with rage and terror.

‘Every junk tows a string of demons,’ Kowalski explained. “They get rid of them by crossing the bows of another who has to add ‘em to his own. That’s why the first junk’s so pleased and the second’s so goddam burned-up.’

Half-deafened by the din, they pushed their way towards a walkway that led to a pontoon beneath the brick business section, shoving between coolies, hurrying clerks, houseboys carrying strings of fish, and merchants in long blue gowns. A wobbling black bicycle with a doped and trussed pig across it paused to let them pass, and a singsong girl, with enamelled face and vermilion mouth, on her way home with a fat amah panting along behind on deformed lily feet, gazed with interest up at them.

Moving to the water’s edge was like trying to push through a football crowd. The banners billowing above their heads outside the shops, the splashes of vivid colour that came from the Chinese symbols on the walls, the high-pitched yelling and the incessant plink-plonk that seemed to be everywhere they went gave the river bank a carnival air.

The sampan was a tiny boat with a low blunt prow, wider at the high stem so that it looked like a hansom cab without the horse. Ira and Kowalski sat on a strip of rush matting and swayed as the boat rocked to the strokes of the wizened boatman standing above them with a single, pivoted oar. As they moved off, the old man began to sing softly, in the same monotonous tone as the coolies along the bund.

Kowalski went on talking. ‘I fixed it for the other machines to be at a field we’ve hired at Linchu,’ he said. ‘You’ll be able to assemble ‘em there, I guess. Gasoline’s already waiting. When you’re ready, you’ll fly ‘em to Kailin, near Hwai-Yang. Hwai-Yang’s Tsu’s headquarters, two hundred fifty miles from Nanking. You’ll recognise it by the Tien An-Men steps on the river. He’s collected his machines there under his chief of air staff, Captain Yang, and training’ll commence as soon as you arrive.’

They disembarked among a floating, creaking, bumping mat of sampans and junks, and a small boy immediately approached Ira with shrill offers of entertainment.

‘My sister schoolteacher,’ he said. ‘Give nice time. Very filthy.’

Kowalski pushed him aside as though he’d never even seen him and threaded his way through the beggars displaying their leprosy, their paralysed limbs, their twisted bones and their wounds. The stench was staggering.

‘On the Chinese side of the river,’ Kowalski explained with a grin, ‘things aren’t quite so grand as on the European side.’

An elderly Vauxhall with the hood up was waiting for them alongside an old solid-tyred Thorneycroft lorry. A Chinese held the door open and they sped through the teeming streets, honking their way in and out of mule trains, oxcarts, Peking carts, ancient broughams and trotting ponies, and barrows weighed down with fruit and vegetables. There were sedan chairs, bicycles, and a multitude of rickshaws, and all the drivers, bearers and runners were shouting abuse or greetings at each other, while all the time watermen flung ladles of water under their feet to lay the choking dust. There were no Sikh policemen on this side of the river to marshal the traffic and there seemed no order or sense in its movement.

All round them there was the sound of hammering, from coppersmiths, iron workers, blacksmiths and silversmiths; and the high-pitched voices from tea-houses and shops mingled with it in a curiously Chinese melody.

Eventually they left the town behind them and began to rattle along a road through a plain set with rice and maize, and broken with paddies smelling strongly of human manure. Here and there wooden pump wheels were rotated by blindfolded donkeys or sinewy coolies on treadmills, and from time to time, Ira saw tombs among the pines and small poverty-stricken farms.

The day was still heavy and the sky now contained great thunderheads of cloud along the horizon, so that the afternoon was full of steamy heat that made his starched collar wilt.

‘The rainy season’ll be over soon,’ Kowalski explained. ‘In Hwai-Yang they have a short spring with a lot of rain, and then a dry summer with nothing but dust storms. Tsu’s keen to have everything ready for the dry season when the campaigning starts.’

As the car rattled over a raised knoll, they saw the flying field ahead of them, a wide stretch of bleak marshy ground covered with sparse grass, with a single small hut about as big as a woodshed, two foreign-looking tents of thin canvas with high sides, and a lopsided lorry whose springs appeared to be in a sorry state of repair.

‘Is this it?’ Ira’s jaw dropped. There seemed to be nothing but the flat treeless plain with a glint of water in the distance. ‘What about fitting shops? Rigging sheds? Motor transport? Stores? Some sort of office?’

Kowalski shrugged, his face solemn and amused ait Ira’s bewilderment. ‘Brother,’ he said, ‘you’re in China now.’ Alongside the solitary hut were two aircraft, still tarpaulined and with crated wings. A small group of coolies, all brown skin, ribs and blue rags under broad bamboo hats, squatted near them with a set of greasy cards marked as dominoes, shouting and laughing and gesticulating. They were watched by a small huddle of children, chattering like magpies, and two or three women who appeared to be washing the caked grime from a baby’s face with a cloth they were dipping into a teapot.

Ira was staring with interest at the aeroplanes. They were ageing rapidly and looked, in fact, as though they had one foot in the grave, but an acute sense of delighted nostalgia caught him as he gazed at them. One of them was a German Albatros, a good scout machine in its day with its hundred-and-sixty-horse-power Mercedes engine, fast and manoeuvrable even if with a reputation for being heavy on the controls. The second machine, he saw at once from the flanged rudders and elevators and the lifting surface between the wheels, was one of Anthony Fokker’s designs, and a D7 if he wasn’t mistaken--a machine so good with its big B.M.W. engine, every German factory in production in 1918 had been turned over to them. There had been a time in France when his heart would have stopped to see either of them approaching him in the air.

As the car came to a halt, a European in breeches and boots and a tweed jacket came forward to meet them. He was tall, heavily built and good-looking, with thick black hair, a flushed red face and red eyeballs like boiled marbles to match. Ira noticed immediately that his hands shook and caught the scent of whisky.

‘Sweet Sufferin’ J.,’ he said at once to Kowalski in an Irish accent you could cut with a knife. ‘Look at the importance of him! Riding in a car! And here we are a week now, and divil a bloody mechanic anywhere in sight! ‘

The American gestured at Ira. They’ve arrived,’ he said dryly. Together with another aeroplane. This is Ira Penaluna.’ The tall man turned slowly to stare at Ira. His eyes were unfriendly at first but then the anger melted into curiosity. ‘ “By Pol, Tre and Pen ye shall know the Cornishmen,” ‘ he quoted. ‘There was a kid called Penaluna in France. A broth of a boy in the air. There can’t be two with a name as daft as that.’

Ira smiled. ‘Same bloke. Should I know you?’

The Irishman shrugged. ‘Shouldn’t think so. Not in the same class. Pat Fagan’s the name. Padraic O’Faolain Fenoughty Fagan, if you’re wantin’ the lot. The man who fought the monkey in the dustbin.’

He was still staring at Ira, his hostile manner slowly vanishing, and beyond him, Ira saw a woman, also dressed in breeches but wearing a yellow shirt and a leather coat, appear from the hut and vanish into one of the tents.

‘Holy Mother of Mary,’ Fagan went on ruefully. ‘No wonder they said “no” when I offered to run this little circus. It might just as well have been Rickenbacker or Billy Bishop who turned up. What brought you out to this hole?’

‘Flying. What brought you?’

Fagan gave a hoot of laughter and flicked his hand in an expansive gesture. ‘Poverty. Not bein’ able to face twenty-five years of nose-to-the-grindstone and well-done-thou-good-and-faithful. Too many ex-pilots trying to make a livin’ back home. Take your pick. They’re all true. Too much eye-on-the-ball in England. Seemed easier to go to South Africa.’ He gave a hoot of laughter. ‘Sure, though, in South Africa, there weren’t
enough
people. It didn’t pay. We went bust.’

‘The planes yours?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did you get ‘em?’

Fagan gave a broad grin that seemed full of malicious triumph. ‘Inherited ‘em,’ he said.

There was something in his manner that seemed to preclude further questions and Ira tried a new tack.

‘What about the other pilot?’ he asked.

Fagan grinned, held up a portentous hand and disappeared into the crowd. Kowalski stared after him, frowning.

‘You’ll need to keep a sharp eye on our friend Fagan,’ he advised quietly.

Ira turned to him. ‘Why?’

Kowalski smiled. ‘I guess it won’t take you long to find out.’

Fagan was pushing his way back to them through the crowd now, with the woman Ira had seen earlier. He stopped in front of them, mischievous-looking as a rebellious schoolboy.

He gestured at Ira. ‘Himself,’ he said to the woman, then, turning to Ira, he gave a shrill laugh that sounded slightly mad, and made the introductions.

‘Your other pilot,’ he said. ‘Ellie Putnam--er--that is--Ellie Fagan. Me wife.’

6

Ellie Fagan was a lean blonde American, with a thin hard body that had a tigerish tautness about it, as if the slightest noise would make her jump. She stared arrogantly at Ira, her short cropped hair like a golden helmet, her expression full of sharp resentment.

She was older than Fagan and her attitude towards him seemed a mixture of aggressive hostility and acute unease, as though she were expecting him all the time to break out and smash something. It was a feeling that was not lost on Ira, because Fagan’s size alone seemed dangerous and his unrestrained bull-in-a-china-shop enthusiasm made Ira want to flinch.

‘The planes were Ellie’s,’ he was saying with a noisy gaiety that seemed wildly out of place. ‘I took ‘em over when Ches Putnam--er--went out of business. Inherited ‘em, you might say, with Ellie.’

Ellie’s face seemed to twist scornfully, so that Ira half-expected her to produce some cutting retort that would reduce Fagan to a midget, but she refrained, though it seemed to require an effort, and contented herself with warily studying Ira.

‘You were expecting maybe Richthofen?’ she asked.

Ira smiled and shook his head and she went on in the same flat Middle-West accent. ‘Not a dame, anyway.’

‘No,’ Ira agreed. ‘Not a dame.’ Though he’d certainly not been surprised. Quite a few women had been bitten by the flying bug since the war and he could even remember seeing Louie de Havilland sewing the fabric of her husband’s frail machines at Farnborough long before 1914.

‘I met Ches Putnam while he was instructing on Spads for the Army Air Force,’ Ellie went on briskly. ‘We got around a bit after he quit, and ended up in South Africa.’

Her manner was brittle and her speech staccato, and Ira questioned her cautiously, aware that it wouldn’t take much to bring her violently, angrily, alive.

‘What about flying?’ he asked.

‘I’m comfortable in an airplane,’ she said. ‘I’ve been handling ‘em since I was sixteen. My old man was barnstorming in the States till he broke his neck crashing a June Bug. We’re unlucky. Some fliers are. My brother killed himself in a Nieuport in France. The first sound I remember was a Curtiss tuning up.’

‘What sort of experience . . . ?’ Ira began and her face came alive at once.

‘What you can do, I can do,’ she said quickly. ‘Maybe better.’

There was a pause before Ira spoke again. ‘Look,’ he said slowly, his voice mild, ‘I don’t give a damn if you’re male, female or neuter. I’ve come out here to train pilots, and a good instructor’s more use to me than an aerobatics expert.’ Her expression altered subtly as she stared back at him, and some of the tautness went out of her manner. ‘I can instruct,’ she said. ‘My husband gave me all the dope.’

Ira glanced at Fagan, but she shook her head. ‘Ches Putnam,’ she said. ‘We used to give lessons in Durban. I’ve taught plenty people to fly.’

Ira was about to ask what had happened to her first husband, the American, but she jumped in quickly, as though she wished to save him embarrassment. ‘Ches was killed two years ago,’ she said. ‘In South Africa. We ran a display but it didn’t amount to much. We had some bad luck. There were four of us. Ches and me and two South Africans. But a couple of kids were killed when an engine failed and it cost us a lot. Then one of the South Africans flew into a house and Pat joined us.’ She nodded at Fagan, who jumped clumsily to attention and looked heavily charming and sympathetic. Then the other South African killed himself when his motor cut while he was stunting. After that...’