High Road to China. Jon Cleary
he went out of the room.
Sun Nan moved round to the other side of the table, picked up a napkin and wiped his knife. He put it back in his pocket, did up the buttons of the jacket, bowed his head to Eve. ‘I am not used to being treated like that, Miss Tozer.’
‘Not even by your master?’ She was rigid with anger at him.
‘No white man is my master. Or mistress. You had better remember that, Miss Tozer.’
He left the room, turning his back on them and moving unhurriedly as if he knew neither Eve nor O’Malley would dare to touch him.
‘The bastard!’ said O’Malley.
Weyman stirred, opened his eyes and tried to sit up. But O’Malley pushed him back, while Eve found a cushion and put it under his head. She wrapped another napkin round his wounded left hand. Weyman looked at his right arm, propped up on O’Malley’s knee, and shook his head, as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened to him.
‘I could kill him.’
‘I’d stop you first,’ said O’Malley. ‘You heard what Miss Tozer said this morning. She needs him more than us. And he knows it.’
Weyman looked at both of them, then at his arm. ‘How bad is it?’
‘I don’t know. It’s not good, that’s about all I can say.’
Kern came back. ‘The doctor will be here in ten minutes. Where is Herr Sun?’
‘Gone up to his room,’ said Eve. ‘He won’t run away.’
‘Perhaps you would do me the favour of explaining all this?’ Kern was coldly polite.
Eve hesitated, then told Kern everything. He listened without any expression on his face. When she had finished he looked down at Weyman. ‘Herr Weyman is not going to be able to fly tomorrow.’
George Weyman was stubborn, but not stupid: at least not about practical matters. ‘I couldn’t handle a machine, not the way my arm feels now.’
‘We’ll have to fly on tomorrow,’ Eve said. ‘We can’t be delayed. Can we leave Mr Weyman and his machine here with you?’
‘There is no alternative,’ said Kern. ‘But you still have to have your other aeroplanes released by Herr Bultmann.’
‘Can’t you help us there?’ Eve pleaded. ‘You can see how much even a day’s delay may mean to us.’
‘I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime we should get Herr Weyman up to his room.’
‘What do we tell the doctor?’ O’Malley asked.
‘That it was an accident,’ said Kern. ‘This man was my uncle’s doctor for years. He won’t ask awkward questions.’
The doctor didn’t. Old, thin, looking like his own most regular patient, he came, fixed up Weyman’s arm, ordered him to rest. ‘You have damaged the tendon, too. It may be a long time before your arm is perfectly well again.’
‘What did he say?’ asked Weyman, irritated by the doctor’s inability to speak English. Kern told him and he shook his head in angry disappointment. ‘When you get to China, Miss Tozer, throw that swine out of your machine, will you? From a great height.’
Eve smiled, though it was an effort. ‘Just get well, Mr Weyman. Go back to England. You’ll be paid in full.’ Then she turned away, put a hand to her forehead. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them as she felt herself sway. ‘I’m tired. I’ll go to bed, if you’ll excuse me, Baron.’
Kern took her to the door of her room, kissed her hand. ‘We’ll solve your problem, Fräulein Tozer. Just get a good night’s sleep.’
‘My problem isn’t here, Baron. It is in China.’
She closed the bedroom door, undressed, got into the big four-poster bed. She stared out through the open window, saw a star fall across the purple-black sky. She believed in omens, but, exhausted emotionally and mentally, couldn’t remember what a falling star meant. But it reminded her of the flash on Sun Nan’s knife as he had plunged it into George Weyman’s arm. That had been some sort of omen, she knew; and cried for her father, the prisoner in a land of superstitions. She wondered if her father, staring out of his window wherever he was held, had seen the same star fall. Then remembered that it would be already dawn in China, the beginning of another precious day to be marked off by the man who held her father captive.
2
In the morning, at breakfast, Kern said, ‘Would you allow me to take Herr Weyman’s place?’
Eve ed at O’Malley. There were only the three of them at the table Weyman was in his room, still asleep. Sun Nan, careful of his manners, had asked to be excused from eating with them; munching an apple, he was now out on the terrace, admiring the scenery like any unworried, conscience-free visitor. Breakfast made a mockery of the claim that people further north were on the verge of starvation; eggs, bacon, sausages, fruit, three sorts of bread loaded the table like some harvest offering. The fruits of defeat, thought O’Malley, who hadn’t had a breakfast like this in longer than he cared to think about. And looked at Kern and wondered if he could put up with the arrogant ex-enemy.
‘It’s up to you, Miss Tozer.’ He sipped his coffee, tasted the mushy bitterness of it; at least the coffee in England wasn’t made from acorns, as this was. ‘If it won’t offend the Baron to fly a British machine.’
‘You are a flier like me, Herr O’Malley. You know real pilots draw no distinctions between aeroplanes. Your fliers had as much admiration for our Albatroses and Fokkers as we had for your SE’s and Bristols. All one looks for is a machine that gives him pleasure to fly.’
‘At least we have that much in common.’ O’Malley tried not to sound too grudging. ‘If the Baron flew with von Richthofen, he’d be a good pilot. I know – I flew against the Circus.’
‘We may even have flown against each other,’ said Kern.
‘The thought had occurred to me. Were you ever shot down?’
Kern hesitated, but his honesty was equal to his pride. ‘Once. I was flying an Albatros and we ran into an English formation above Rosières. I shot down two machines, two Camels, then a third one got above me, put me on fire. I got back to our own lines, but only just. My mechanics dragged me out, but not before I was burned. Here.’ He ran his right hand down his left side and left arm. ‘It was 22 July 1918.’
O’Malley looked at his coffee cup, pushed it away. ‘I still fly that Camel back home in England.’
Kern showed no surprise: the war in the air had always been a local affair. ‘Did you claim me as a kill?’
‘I’m afraid so. I thought you were a dead duck.’
Kern shook his head, smiled thinly. ‘Your count was wrong, Herr O’Malley. So I am one up on you, thirty-two to thirty-one.’
‘Are you finished, both of you?’ Eve, worn out, had slept soundly; but she had woken depressed. The offer by Kern had given her a momentary lift, but now she was annoyed by these two men and their reminiscences that had nothing to do with what concerned her so much. ‘This is not a lark, Baron – ’
‘The war was no lark, Fräulein.’
Eve ignored that: she knew it had been no lark, but these two talked as if it had been some sort of deadly game in the air. ‘Our arrangement would be a business one. The same terms as I’m paying Mr O’Malley. Five hundred pounds and your return fare. I don’t know what that is in marks.’
Kern smiled. ‘Who does know? Yesterday it could have been a billion marks, today a trillion. The money is immaterial, Fräulein Tozer. But I’ll take it.’
He’s as broke as I am, thought O’Malley. The castle, the big Mercedes, the servants,