Read Online The Mercenaries by John Harris - Free Book Online Page B

at once--almost as though they could smell work--by a vast number of coolies, carpenters, laundrymen and labourers, each one with his assistant and his makee-learn boy, who trailed around after him learning pidgin English and the habits of Europeans for the time when he, too, would work for one.
    None of them was much good and those who didn’t regard the aeroplanes as a rather elaborate joss, like the paper animals and motor cars and furniture they’d seen carried at weddings and funerals, considered them highly dangerous beasts that had to be approached with care. Within a week, one of them had blown himself up opening a can of motor spirit with a cadged cigarette in his mouth, and when they picked him up with singed eyebrows and hair and a startled look on his face, he promptly turned and bolted from the field, never to return.
    They all seemed to get on with Ira, but Sammy, although he made them giggle and roll on the ground at the string of dubious Chinese words he’d begun to pick up, never missed a thing they did wrong and became known to them as a man whose eyes could see not only forward but also in the opposite direction through the back of his head.
    Neither Ellie nor Fagan was a mechanic and was able to do no more than the simplest inspections, so that Ira managed to insist at least on a routine check on all the engines before they even contemplated moving north. Leaving the resentful Fagan and the coolies to concern themselves with sorting out spares in the tents Kowalski had produced, they set up a fitter’s bench on a flat stone and, with trestles flung together by a Chinese carpenter, got down to testing compression and examining ignition, valves and pumps, going through what ill-kept log books and inspection sheets Fagan possessed, and comparing invoices and lists of spares that came, with the lists of those that never came.
    Fagan grumbled all the time, noisy, pathetic, resentful of Ira’s authority, yet curiously attractive with his lunatic humour and his Irish charm ‘White men don’t get themselves covered with grease and oil, me eager ould son,’ he pointed out gaily. ‘They get coolies to do that sort of work out here.’
    That’s O.K.,’ Ira said equably, ‘if the coolies know how to service a Mercedes DIII--and I don’t think ours do.’
    Fagan made one of his wild gestures. ‘Ah, Sweet Sufferin’ J., they can do it with someone standin’ over ‘em, can’t they?’ he insisted. ‘Sure, they soon get the hang. Monkey see. Monkey learn. We got a nigger to do it in South Africa. We never worried very much.’
    Ira studied him for a moment. ‘I expect that’s why your motors always cut,’ he said gravely. ‘And why you killed yourselves with such monotonous regularity.’
    Fagan studied him for a second, then he gave his mad laugh. ‘Ach, well,’ he shouted, ‘there’s nothin’ like a disaster or two for puttin’ a sparkle in the old eye, is there?’
    He was never serious, rarely entirely sober and always difficult to work with. Among other things, he claimed to be a practising Catholic and, flourishing a rosary, demanded time off to go into Shanghai to worship.
    Since he didn’t return until late and didn’t seem very sober when he did, Ira soon decided he used most of the time for drinking. He was devious, not very clever and unwilling to take orders, and dodged away most afternoons to sleep off his previous night’s whisky.
    Eventually he failed to turn up at all and Ellie’s face grew more and more thunderous as the day progressed. The following morning Kowalski sent a message by his Chinese clerk in a taxi to the effect that he’d found Fagan drunk and required Ira’s assistance to get him home.
    ‘God damn him,’ Ira snorted in disgust as he threw down his tools. ‘I wouldn’t mind if all the bastard did was pinch the coolies to fetch him Hong Kong beer from Linchu--which is what he does most of the time.’
    The taxi dropped him at the address in Shanghai that