The Mercenaries by John Harris Read Free Book Online Page B

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 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