The Steel Tsar (6 page)

Boots tramped from the house.

“Good God, man, what are you doing?”

I looked up to see the lieutenant striding from the house. He looked pretty pleased with himself.

“This chap’s been stabbed by one of your soldiers,” I said harshly. “I’m trying to help him. Was there any need to—”

The lieutenant glanced contemptuously at the coolie. “Doubtless he tried to kill someone. Crazed by opium—they all are. His own people will look after him. We’re trying to teach them a lesson, after all.”

With strips of the man’s shirt I bandaged up the wound as best I could. He tried to speak and then fainted. Helplessly, I tried to lift him, but it was impossible.

Now the Ghoorkas emerged holding three terrified Chinese in black-and-red smocks; two men and a woman, all badly bruised and probably the proprietors of the den.

The lieutenant’s baton stabbed in their direction. He raised his head and spoke to the empty windows and doors. “Now no more opium! You savvy! Opium bad! These people bad! Go to prison. We lock up long time! Savvy?”

Angrily he tapped his riding boot with his baton. He glared at me and opened his mouth to speak.

“I’m going to try to get this chap to the hospital,” I said. “Can somebody give me a hand?”

The officer took the reins of his horse and looked from me to his soldiers who held their miserable prisoners much more firmly than was necessary.

“One of your men—” I began.

The lieutenant remounted. “I told you, sir. His own people will look after him. You obviously don’t understand the conditions on this island. There’s a dreadful opium problem. It’s increasing daily. They grow the poppies rather than food. I...”

“What else have the bastards got to live for, Begg?” A tired drawl came from the shadowy doorway of the raided house. An English voice.

Lieutenant Begg turned in his saddle and shook his baton at the unseen speaker. “You stay out of this. You’re lucky we didn’t arrest you, too.”

A figure emerged into the sunlight. Dressed in a dirty, faded European suit and a frayed native shirt, he was barefooted, unshaven, emaciated and plainly under the influence of opium. I knew the signs well enough, for I had once been slave to the drug’s consolations. I could not make out his age, but the voice was of quite a young man from the upper middle class.

“I’d have thought you’d be ashamed...” Begg’s face was full of disgust.

“Who are you to deny them their only pleasure, Begg?” drawled the newcomer reasonably. “Let them alone, for God’s sake.”

Lieutenant Begg wheeled his trim cob about and shouted an order to his men. “All right, quick march.” He trotted away without answering the decrepit Englishman.

I watched them go, the Ghoorkas dragging their frightened prisoners back the way they had come.

The Englishman shrugged and turned to re-enter the house.

“Just a minute,” I called. “I must try to get this chap to the hospital. He’s half-dead. Could you give me a hand?”

The man leaned wearily against the door frame. “He’d be better off with his ancestors, believe me.”

“A moment ago you were defending these people.”

“Not defending them, old boy. I’m a fatalist, you see. I told Begg to let them alone. And I tell you the same. What’s the point? He’ll die soon enough.”

But he left the doorway and shuffled into the square, blinking in the sunshine. “Who are you, anyway?”

“I’m an airshipman. I got here a week or so ago.”

“Ah, the shipwrecked mariner. They were talking about you up at the hotel. All right, I’ll help you with him, for what it’s worth.”

The opium-drunk Englishman was no stronger than I was, but together we managed to carry the coolie down the street and along the quay until we reached the hospital.

After a couple of nuns had been called and had taken the wounded man away, I stood panting in the lobby, staring curiously at my helper. “Thanks.”

He smiled slowly. “Think nothing of it. Nothing at all. Cheerio.”

He raised his hand in a sort of ironic salute and then went out. He had gone before Dr. Hira came down the stairs into the lobby.

“Who was that chap?” I asked Hira, describing the wretched Englishman.

Hira recognized the description. He fiddled with his stethoscope. “A castaway, like yourself. He arrived in the airship which came to take off the mine people. He chose to stay on Rowe Island. I don’t know why. It meant they could take one more passenger so they didn’t argue. They call him The Captain sometimes, up at the hotel. Supposed to have been the commander of a merchant airship which crashed in China before the war. A bit of a mystery.”

“Begg doesn’t like him.”

Hira laughed softly. “No, Begg wouldn’t. Captain Dempsey lets the side down, eh? Begg’s for the Europeans keeping up appearances at all costs.”

“Begg certainly works hard.” I wiped a spot of blood off my sleeve.

“I don’t think he ever sleeps. His wife left with the mine people, you know...” Hira glanced at his watch. “Well, it’s almost lunchtime. Fish and rice, as usual, but I’ve managed to get a couple of bottles of beer, if you’d...”

“No thanks,” I said. “I think I’ll head up to the hotel again.”

T
he port where I was staying was the only real town on the island. It was called New Birmingham. Its buildings were clustered close together near the waterfront and were several storeys high. As they wandered up the slopes they drew apart as if fastidious of each other’s squalor and grew smaller until the houses near the top were little more than isolated shanties erected in shallow hollows in the hillside.

Above the shanty district the hill leveled out for a while and became a small plateau on which the airpark had been built. Olmeijer’s hotel stood on the edge of the airpark, which was now overgrown and desolate. I wondered if young Lieutenant Begg would have approved of the hotel, for it had certainly made an attempt to “keep up appearances”. Its big gilt sign was brightly polished and its splendid wooden Gothic exteriors had recently been given a fresh coat of white paint. It looked out of place in its surroundings.

The airpark was dominated by the rusting airship mast erected in its centre. To one side of the park was a single airship hangar, its grey paint peeling, and beside it a pole at which drooped a torn and filthy windsock. Near the pole stood, like the skeletons of large, unearthly insects, the remains of two hovergyros which had been stripped of most of their essential parts. On the other side of the hangar was the shell of a light monoplane, probably the property of some long-gone sportsman, which had been similarly dismembered. The island seemed to be populated by a variety of wrecks, I thought. It seemed to be feeding off corpses, including, as in Begg’s case, the corpses of dead ideas.

After a glance towards the abandoned administration and control buildings to assure myself that they were uninhabited, I made for the hotel.

Pushing open a pair of well-oiled double doors, I walked into the lobby. It was clean, scrubbed, polished and cool. A Malay houseboy was operating the cords of a big punka attached to the ceiling. It fanned air into my face as I entered. I was grateful for this after the heat outside but amused by the fresh incongruity. I nodded to the Malay, who didn’t seem to notice me and, seeing no one at the desk, strolled into the adjacent bar.

In the shady gloom were two men. One sat in his shirtsleeves behind the bar reading a book while the other sat drinking a gin fizz in the far corner near French windows opening onto a verandah. Beyond the windows I could see the airpark and beyond the airpark the slopes of the mountain, covered in thick forest.

As I seated myself on a stool by the bar the man behind it put down his book and looked at me in some surprise. He was very fat and his big, red face was beaded with sweat. His rolled-up sleeves revealed a variety of tattoos of the more restrained kind. There were several gold rings on his thick fingers. He spoke in a deep, guttural accent.

“What can I do for you?”

I began apologetically, “I’m afraid I brought no money, so...”

The fat man’s face broke into a broad smile. “Ja! No money! That’s too bad!” He shook with laughter for a moment. “Now, what will you drink. I’ll put it on the slate, eh?”

“Very good of you. I’ll have a brandy.” I introduced myself. “Are you the hotel’s proprietor?”

“Ja. I am Olmeijer, certainly.” He seemed inordinately proud of the fact. He took a large ledger from under the counter, selected a fresh page and entered my name at the top. “Your account,” he said. “When things are better, you can pay me.” He turned to take down a bottle of cognac.

“You’ve a chap called Underwood staying here, I believe?” I said.

“Underwood, certainly.” He put a large brandy on the bar. “Twenty cents. On the slate.” He made an entry in the ledger and replaced it out of sight.

It was good brandy. Perhaps it tasted even better for being the first drink I had had since Singapore. I savoured it.

“But Underwood,” said Olmeijer with a wink and a jerk of his thumb, “has gone up the mountain.”

“And you’ve no idea when he’ll be back.”

I heard one of the wicker chairs scrape on the polished floor, then footsteps approached me. I turned. It was the man who had been sitting near the window. He held his empty glass in his hand.

“Underwood will be back when the gin he borrowed from Mr. Olmeijer runs out.”

He was a thin, heavily tanned man in his fifties, wearing a khaki bush shirt and white shorts. He had a small, greying moustache and his blue eyes seemed to have a permanent hint of ironic humour in them. “My name’s Nye,” he said as he joined me at the bar. “You must be the airship chap they found in the dugout. Singapore, eh? Must have been awful.”

Nye told me he’d been left behind to protect the interests of the Welland Rock Phosphate Mining Company while the rest of the white employees went back to England or Australia. He was keen to hear about the attack on Singapore. Briefly, for the memory was still hard to bear, I told him what had happened.

“I still can’t believe it,” I concluded. “There was a peace treaty.”

He smiled bitterly and sipped his drink. “Everyone had a peace treaty, didn’t they? We’d abolished war, hadn’t we? But human nature being what it is...” He looked up at the rows of bottles in front of him. “Bloody Japs. I knew they’d start something sooner or later. Greedy bastards!”

“The Japanese would not have blown up their own—” began Olmeijer. Nye interrupted him with a sharp laugh.

“I don’t know how that city got blown up, but it was the excuse everybody needed to start scrapping.” He tilted his glass to his lips. “I suppose we’ll never know how it happened or who did it. But that’s not the point. They’d have been fighting by now even if it hadn’t happened.”

“I wish you were right!”

I recognized the new voice and turned to see Dempsey walking wearily into the bar. He nodded to me and Nye and placed a dirty hand on the counter. “Large scotch please, Olmeijer.”

The Dutchman didn’t seem pleased to see his latest customer, but he poured the drink and carefully wrote the cost down in his ledger.

There was an embarrassed pause. For all he had interrupted our conversation, Dempsey apparently wasn’t prepared to amplify his remark.

“Afternoon, Dempsey,” I said.

He smiled faintly and rubbed at his unshaven chin. “Hello, Bastable. Moving in?”

“I was looking for Underwood.”

He took a long pull at his drink. “There’s a lot of people looking for Underwood,” he said mysteriously.

“What do you mean?”

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Another drink, Bastable?” said Nye. “Have this one on me.” And then, as if with a slight effort. “You, Dempsey?”

“Thanks.” Dempsey finished his drink and put his glass back on the bar. Olmeijer poured another gin, another brandy, another scotch.

Nye took a case of cheroots from his shirt pocket and offered them around. Olmeijer and Dempsey accepted, but I refused. “What did you mean, just then?” Nye asked Dempsey. “You don’t care about all this, surely? I thought you were the chap so full of oriental fatalism.”

Dempsey turned away. For a moment his dead eyes had seemed to burn with a terrible misery. He took his glass to a nearby table and sat down. “That’s me,” he said.

But Nye wouldn’t let it go. “You weren’t in Japan when the bombing started, were you?”

Dempsey shook his head. “No, China.” I noticed that his hands were shaking as he lifted his glass to his mouth and he seemed to be muttering something under his breath. I thought I heard the words “God forgive me”. He finished the drink quickly, got up and shambled towards the door. “Thanks, Nye. See you later.”

His wasted body disappeared through the doors and I saw him begin to climb the flight of wooden stairs which led up from the lobby.

Nye raised his eyebrows in a quizzical look. He shrugged. “I think Dempsey has become what we used to call an ‘island case’. We had a few of them going native, in the old days, or taking up opium, like him. The stuff’s killing him, of course, and he knows it. He’ll be dead within six months, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“I’d have given him longer than that,” I said feelingly. “I’ve known opium smokers who live to a ripe old age.”

Nye drew on his cheroot. “It’s not just the opium, is it? I mean, there’s such a thing as a
will
to die. You know that as well as I do.”

I nodded soberly. I had encountered my own share of such desires.

“I wonder what did it,” Nye mused. “A woman, perhaps. He was an airshipman, you know. Perhaps he lost his ship, or deserted her or something?”

Olmeijer grunted and looked up from his book. “He’s just a weak man. Just weak, that’s all.”

“Could be.” I got up. “I think I’ll head back now. Mind if I come up tomorrow? I’d like to be here when Underwood returns.”

“See you tomorrow.” Nye lifted his hand in a salute. “I wish you the best of luck, Bastable.”

* * *

T
hat night I dined on fish and fruit with Hira. I told him about my conversation at the hotel and my second encounter with Dempsey. His earlier remark had aroused my curiosity and I asked Hira if he knew anything at all of Dempsey’s reasons for coming to the island.