Five

The man waiting in the lounge was lanky, slow-speaking and lantern-jawed, with blond hair plastered to his skull. He had a gold-topped cane and a high stiff collar that seemed to saw at his ears.

Ira liked him at once for his shy, self-effacing manner, and the humour behind his eyes.

‘Eddie Kowalski,’ he said, making a gesture with his hat that was almost a bow. ‘Yank. I guess you’ll find me quite trustworthy, nevertheless, because I was in this flying thing of yours from the beginning. I’m your agent in Shanghai and my background’s OK. Until recently it was the Chase Bank, but I’ve just left ’em to handle business on my own. Real estate, import–export, anything. I’ll be handling your financial arrangements, that insurance you so wisely insisted on for everybody, and what supplies it’s been possible to get for you.’ Kowalski stopped and gave a sudden infectious grin. ‘Though they aren’t so goddam much, I guess.’

They sat in the crowded lounge, surrounded by the movement of porters with baggage and the stiff farewells of the old China hands returning after their leaves in England. The place was full of people and luggage – tweedy Europeans still garbed for winter; uniformed ship’s officers; and a multitude of Chinese clerks and shore workers who had swarmed all over the ship for a thousand and one contracted tasks. The din was deafening and they had to shout to make themselves heard.

‘Call on my firm for help any time,’ Kowalski urged. ‘Politically, I guess you’ve come at a lousy time.’

‘Why?’

Kowalski gestured with his drink. ‘Brother, how do you explain chaos? Bismarck said it was best to let China sleep but, holy mackerel, she’s awake now and hell’s a-poppin’.’

He gulped at his beer and gestured at the waterfront. The slopeheads are beginning to want their country back,’ he explained. ‘From you. And me. And the French. And the Japanese. And all the other bastards who’re on their goddam backs. They object to the treaty ports and I guess I would, too. They were hi-jacked from the Manchus when they’d lost their power and now all the river and rail trade’s run by ’em. They suck every bit of profit out of China and take it to Europe and the States, and the white taipans have so little regard for the slopeheads they’re even excluded with the dogs from their own goddam parks.’

‘Don’t these warlords do anything about it?’

Kowalski grinned. ‘You bet,’ he said. ‘But not the way you think. Because both the Canton and Peking governments are broke, and they appoint the warlords to run their provinces and raise taxes. Unfortunately, they stuff the dough into their own pockets instead and recruit armies to make sure they can’t be slung out. They get their men from the coolies and the criminals and, if the warlord decides things are getting too hot for him and quits to go to Hong Kong or Singapore or Japan with all the dough he’s stashed away, his boys go on the rampage and in a few hours they’re nothing more than bandits.’

‘And what about the war? Who’s really fighting who?’

Kowalski laughed. ‘This is getting to be a regular Gettysburg address,’ he said. ‘Chiefly, it’s just private scores being settled – like the one between Tsu and Kwei. The rest fight with silver bullets – dollars. When they meet, they bargain and one of them retires. Taxes are levied by the new guy – hell, sometimes fifty years in advance! – merchants are milked dry, a few heads fall, a few women get raped, a few boys get dragged off for the armies and a few crops get stolen, and the new regime’s installed. Cities are always being “liberated” but it makes no goddam difference because everybody who knew how to govern has gone or been murdered. The Americans, the British, the French and the Japanese stay out of the mess unless their nationals are in danger.’

‘And what about Tsu? Is he a warlord?’

‘Sure is.’

‘And does he support Peking?’

‘Officially. Unofficially, the only thing Tsu supports is Tsu.’

Ira smiled uncertainly. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to like the Warlord of the South-West very much.

‘Is he any good?’ he asked.

‘As a general?’ Kowalski pulled a face. ‘Nope. Regular brass brain. As a tax collector? Yep.’

‘What about Kwei?’

‘He’s also a good tax collector but maybe he’s also a good soldier, too. I don’t know. He belongs to Chiang.’

‘Who’s Chiang when he’s at home?’

‘Chiang K’ai-Shek. One of the late Sun Yat-Sen’s boys and the latest candidate for overall warlord of all China. He fancies himself as a dictator but he’ll go as far as all the others, I guess, and no farther. He wants to sweep away all warlords and foreign devils like you and me, and he doesn’t like Tsu because Tsu once called him a liar and a thief.’

Ira sat back, staring at the American, overwhelmed by the intricacies of the Chinese internal situation. In time, no doubt, he’d sort out all these people with their tongue-twisting names and they’d become identities instead of mere labels belonging to political parties that meant nothing to him.

‘What’s your view?’ he asked. ‘On why I’m here, I mean.’

Kowalski grinned. ‘Brother, take everything that’s going,’ he advised. ‘If you don’t, some other guy will. Steer clear of the Shanghai white women. The first thing they do is size up how good you’ll be in bed. Don’t eat the lettuce – you’d be surprised what they use for fertiliser – and watch out for the peasant. He’s up to all sorts of tricks behind his kow-tow. Get all you can out of it. In ten years’ time it won’t be possible. China’s been milked for generations by foreigners and they’re only just beginning to catch on. Any minute now there’ll be an explosion. So follow Tsu but, boy, make goddam sure you’ve left a line of retreat open to the coast.’

 

While they had been talking, a tender had arrived alongside to take the Avro to the Chinese side of the river, and Ira went to scout Lawn from his cabin. He was aware of disappointment, and anger at being misled, and had a feeling that what he’d bitten off was likely to prove bigger than he could chew.

Lawn showed no sign of enthusiasm as he explained what he wanted, and Ira knew at once he was going to trot out every excuse he could think of to avoid work. He was dressed for going ashore in a blue suit and solar topee, and he looked uncertain as Ira approached.

‘Geary’s not goin’ to like workin’ in this weather, sonny,’ he pointed out immediately.

‘Why not? That’s what he came for, isn’t it?’

‘’E was expecting it to be like Durban. ’E’ll need time to get used to it. ’E was ’oping to go ashore.’

‘So were you, by the look of you. All you’ve got to do is handle the coolies. You said you could.’

Lawn still looked unwilling but he agreed in the end and, watched from the water’s edge by hundreds of yelling, laughing Chinese, gambling away their wages or swopping them for bowls of rice and herbs and dried fish, they got the Avro on to the tender and ready for its trip across the river. With an audience of hundreds, their lemon skins reflecting the thin sun, their grinning faces shadowed by conical straw hats and headcloths, it was like a circus performance, with shrieks of joy and cartwheels greeting every slip and every bout of cursing. But it was finished at last and Ira was standing alongside the Avro, running his hand over the taut, patched fabric, when Kowalski appeared with a Chinese in heavy overalls.

‘I’ve got a sampan waiting right now,’ he said, gesturing beyond the stern of the tender. ‘You’d better come out to the airfield and meet the other pilots. Mr Peng here’ll accompany the machine to the other side. We’ve a lorry there waiting to tow it away.’

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 pennant 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 stern 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, ironworkers, 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 at 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-horsepower 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 BMW 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.’