“All you need do is walk past. I’ll take the picture from here. No one will notice.”
Lester laughed and turned his back on the scene. “You’re getting to be crazier than me.”
Malplacket offered him the camera. “Very well. You take the picture and I’ll go.”
Lester plucked at his fly and laughed again, nervous as a bridegroom. “Go to hell,” he said. He turned and walked away. His shoulders were hunched. He looked as if he might be holding his breath.
Malplacket let him cross the street and come back, and he got a nice, busy shot of him passing in front of the machine guns. He wound the film on and shot him waving away an Arab who was trying to sell fly-whisks.
“Let’s beat it.” Lester was walking so fast he was almost running.
Malplacket went with him. “Is there a problem?”
“I think I should’ve saluted somebody back there, a general or something. Somebody shouted at me.”
Malplacket glanced behind them. Nothing had changed. A couple of German officers on the steps were laughing at whatever a third officer was saying. Lester scuttled round the first corner he reached. Malplacket hurried after him and grabbed his arm.
“Come on, let’s go, let’s go,” Lester urged.
“Nobody is following us. Nobody is interested in us, I assure you.” Malplacket was amused by Lester’s jumpiness. “Do try to get a grip of yourself, old chap. If you persist in looking as horribly guilty as this, we shall both end up in the clink.” Lester scowled. Malplacket photographed him, scowling. “I thought you Americans were made of sterner stuff,” he said. “How you conquered the West if you went to pieces every time a Cherokee cleared his throat, I can’t imagine. That sort of attitude wouldn’t have done in India. Not enough English phlegm, that’s your trouble. Now if—”
“OK,” Lester said. “Enough.”
Malplacket gave him the camera. “I don’t intend to be left out of your scoop,” he said. “Be sure I’m in focus.”
They returned to the street. Malplacket strolled past the military headquarters and turned. He saluted as he walked by the steps; a senior officer paused in conversation and returned the salute. Perfect, Malplacket thought. And if he missed that shot I shall strangle him. He crossed the street. Lester was not in sight.
Around the corner, twenty yards away, Lester was nodding and frowning as a pair of German naval officers spoke to him. They seemed very young and very friendly. Malplacket dashed forward. “Wilhelm!” he shouted. “Wilhelm!” They all turned. Malplacket made an urgent show of tapping his wristwatch. Lester backed away from the Germans, gesturing his helplessness. Malplacket took his arm and hurried him off.
They lost themselves in the crowd. “What on earth did they want?” Malplacket asked.
“Beats me. Maybe they thought they recognized me. I kept on coughing and shaking my head . . . Listen, I’ve had enough of all this. My ulcer’s burning.”
“Did you take my picture?”
“Yeah, yeah, I took your lousy picture.” Lester’s voice had become weak and thin, and it kept on breaking up. “Let’s get back to the goddamn car.”
It was a long walk and by now the day was very hot. Twice, Lester had to stop and rest. When they reached the ruined villa, and the Fiat was still there, he let out a long sigh of relief.
“I suggest a siesta,” Malplacket said. It sounded peculiar. They laughed.
“Feel free, friend. Suggest a siesta to Lestah.” That sounded utterly absurd. Lester laughed until his stomach muscles hurt, and he had to lean against the car. “I got news,” he said when he stopped gasping for breath. “There’s a guy upstairs.”
Malplacket thought it was a joke until Lester took out his pistol. He moved alongside Lester and looked up. Half the ceiling had collapsed when the roof caved in. Upstairs, in the tangle of broken beams and planks, just visible at the fringe of destruction, was an army boot with some bare leg attached.
“Whoever he is, he’s not doing us any harm,” Malplacket said. He felt slightly sick: too much tension, too much heat. “Why don’t we just leave him alone?”
“He’s hiding. He’s probably a deserter.” Lester’s voice was cracking up again. “Might be dangerous. Might be armed.”
“I’m sorry, old chap, I simply can’t handle another crisis before lunch. Just fix the car, quickly, so that we can go.”
“Sure.” As Lester moved forward, the boot moved back. It dislodged a dribble of stones. Lester stopped. Nobody spoke. Plaster dust sifted slowly through bars of sunlight. There was more movement above. More rubble fell.
“For Pete’s sake,” Lester said miserably. The pistol hung from his fingers like a dead thing.
A man crawled to the edge and looked down at them. He was young and small and thin. All he wore was shorts and boots. He spoke in German: the words meant nothing to them.
“You never saw us, kid,” Lester said. “And we never saw you. Now crawl back into your hole.”
With one hand the young man gripped the splintered end of a beam and he swung into space. It was a fall of about eight feet and he landed badly. He was weeping with pain, but he stumbled to his feet and raised his arms in surrender. One arm would not go all the way up. It was broken or dislocated or maybe both. Lester had not seen anyone so thin and filthy since China. What made it worse was the young man’s voice. Throughout the weeping he kept chanting the same shrill German phrase, over and over again. Lester recognized the sound of the mentally ill, a noise so full of hurt that it was unbearable. Sooner or later it would be stopped by a punch in the mouth.
Lester’s hands were shaking as he replaced the distributor cap. “Try the engine!” he called. The Fiat whirred and grumbled and would not start. Lester crossed himself. “You hypocritical bastard,” he whispered. The Fiat coughed and fired and roared, drowning out the German’s manic gabble. Lester scrambled into the car. “What’s wrong with a bit of hypocrisy, anyway?” he said.
“What?”
“Forget it. Wait!” He opened the door and threw a fistful of money. The young German expected a blow: he staggered back, tripped and fell. “Let’s go!” Lester cried.
* * *
Malplacket drove carefully through the town. “You’ve got your story now, haven’t you?” he said. “We can leave, can’t we?” Lester nodded.
They were old Benghazi hands. Finding the way out was easy. Nobody wanted to stop them. They were waved through the roadblock under the triumphal gateway. After that, it took remarkably little time to reach the turn-off where they had parted company with Lampard’s patrol. Malplacket drove into the Jebel and parked under some trees.
They ate lunch: biscuit and bully-beef. An Arab boy appeared and sold them fresh goat’s milk. “It ain’t Groppi’s,” Lester said, “but it’ll do . . . Jeez, I’m tired. We did it. I can’t believe we did it.” He photographed the boy, who smiled.
“I hope you took my picture when I was saluting.”
“Yeah, sure,” Lester shrugged. “I think I did.”
“If you missed that salute I shall never forgive you. Neither will Blanchtower.”
Gibbon had drilled them in the route to the rendezvous. It was simple: they drove through the foothills of the Jebel until they picked up the main camel trail that went south. It crossed the Tariq el ’Abd at a point marked by the skeletons of three camels and the fresh grave of a German soldier. From there they set the sun compass to one hundred and eighty degrees and drove on that bearing for precisely fifty kilometers into the Sahara. They reached the rendezvous by midafternoon. It looked just like the rest of the desert, and it was just as empty.
“I guess we’re early, or he’s late,” Lester said. “Or a bit of both.” They had a box of tinned food and two jerricans of water. That should be enough.
* * *
Toward sunset Malplacket built a fire as he had seen the patrol do it—fill a large can with sand and soak it with petrol—and he made a stew.
By then Lester had finished his stor
y. He had been writing it in his head ever since they had left Benghazi, so putting it down on paper was easy. Malplacket read it as they ate.
“Splendid. Spiffing, in fact. Congratulations.”
“You really like it?”
“Yes, indeed. And Chicago will find it irresistible.”
“It zips along.”
“I enjoyed your moments of irony. Very refreshing.”
“Yeah?” Lester took the pages back. “Huh.” He flicked through them. “This is just a first draft, of course. Still kinda rough in spots.”
“Don’t lose those ironic moments, old chap. They are the little leaven that leavens the lump.” Lester raised his eyebrows. “First Corinthians, chapter four,” Malplacket said. “Feel free to use it. It’s out of copyright.”
“Thank God you’re not judging the Pulitzer. You’d give it to Fanny Farmer’s Cookbook.”
They had one blanket each, and it was not enough. They awoke, shivering, long before dawn, as a scouring wind blew sand into their hair and ears and nose and mouth.
Tea was hot but gritty. They took shelter in the Fiat and listened to the whine and moan. When the sun came up, they watched the desert floor shift and twist as the wind hustled it elsewhere.
“Goddamn weather,” Lester said. “I just hope it doesn’t louse up Lampard’s navigation.”
“Gibbon knows his job. He won the MC, remember.”
“Maybe Gibbon got wounded. Or captured.”
“In England it is a criminal offense to spread alarm and despondency. You are not only spreading it, you are digging it in.”
“I got sand in my crotch.”
Malplacket sighed. “Everyone in the desert has sand in his crotch. Some have more than others. Corporal Pocock, for instance, has a very great deal of it.”
Lester had nothing to say about that. He climbed into the back seat and began to rewrite his story.
The wind dropped at about ten o’clock. Breakfast was another stew; afterward, Malplacket was so tired that he slept in the shade of the car.
The midday sun awoke him. He felt grubby and stained, and he took a short walk to revive himself. That was a mistake. The desert looked bigger and emptier than ever.
Later, he read Lester’s second draft. “Excellent,” he said. “A vast improvement.”
Lester waited. “I took out all that ironic crap,” he said. “You notice?”
“Yes, I did.” Malplacket returned the pages. “Very wise.”
Lester stuffed them into his back pocket.
“The new satirical undertones are far more telling,” Malplacket said.
“Horseshit.”
Malplacket recoiled slightly. “My dear fellow. You do yourself an injustice.”
“Where? Show me where.”
“It runs throughout. The merest undertones. Your satire is never rampant. One of the qualities I most admire in your work is its satirical restraint.”
“Sure. And this heat’s fried your brains.”
An hour before sundown Malplacket cooked another meal. “I’m afraid it’s stew again,” he said. “However, I put in some prunes for variety.”
Lester was standing on the roof of the Fiat, searching the northern horizon. “Forty-eight hours,” he said. “They should be here by now.” He climbed down. “I’ve been thinking. We never would have got into Benghazi without your nosebleed. That was a truly gutsy nosebleed.”
“Thank you. And your performance at the Italian lady’s villa was outstanding.”
“Yeah, I thought so. I’ve always wanted to beat on a door with the butt of a pistol.”
“Gratifying?”
“I found it so.” Lester walked around the car, kicking the tires. “Listen: I know how you feel about alarm and despondency and so on, but . . . Let’s not kid ourselves. This is beginning to look not so good, isn’t it?”
“A fair summary.”
The night was cold again. The dawn was brilliant, but it revealed an empty desert.
“If we don’t go back to the Jebel now,” Malplacket said, “by tomorrow we shall be out of water.” But the Fiat would not start. The more they tried, the more they ran down the battery. Winding the starting handle made noise and blisters, but the engine remained dead. They cleaned every part that was cleanable, and achieved nothing. The sun was brutal. They got into the car to escape it.
“Just tell me one thing,” Lester said. “Honest answer, OK? Did I really put any irony in that first draft?”
“None.”
“How about the second?”
“I invented the satirical undertones.”
“Now tell me why—”
“A joke,” Malplacket said. “All a joke.”
Lester hunched his shoulders and stared at the trembling horizon.
“Hell of a time to make jokes,” he said.
“It was irresistible, I’m afraid.”
“I leave irony to Hemingway. I put irony in a story, it gets spiked.”
“I apologize. In any case I’m afraid that the joke may have been on me. The real irony is all around us, isn’t it? The desert gave us our adventure and now, thanks to the desert, we can’t report it.”
Lester got out and tried the starting handle again. It felt like winding up a diesel locomotive. He soon quit.
“I was going to do a third draft,” he said. “You know, add some more color.”
“I wouldn’t bother, old chap. What you’ve done is fine.”
Lester picked at his blisters. “Anyway, the story’s not over yet, is it?”
“Good point. Who knows what the morrow may bring?”
When the moon rose, they began walking north. Lester carried a jerrican with about three pints of water in it. Malplacket had calculated that it was roughly a hundred kilometers to the edge of the Jebel, to food and water, provided they kept a straight course. The trouble with walking at night was they couldn’t use the sun compass.
“Plenty of stars up there,” Lester said. “I don’t suppose you know how to steer by the stars?”
“Oddly enough, they failed to teach me that at Eton,” Malplacket said. “Very remiss of them, wouldn’t you say?” The three pints of water sloshed back and forth with every pace.
* * *
It took a long time, but details of the strafing of Lampard’s trucks trickled through to SAS headquarters, via the International Red Cross, and Captain Kerr was able to write to the next-of-kin. Colonel von Mansdorf and Oberstleutnant Benno Hoffmann got their information much sooner, of course. A German Desert Rescue column had reached the scene while the wreckage was still smoking and brought all the bodies back to Benghazi. Benno Hoffmann escorted Dr. Grandinetti to Schramm’s funeral. He was distressed when she cried during the service, but it was only a little, and he cheered up when she smiled at him.
“Poor Paul,” she said. “Poor me. Poor us.”
Afterward, he took her for a drink at the Officers’ Club. “The first time we went out for dinner, this was where he wanted us to go,” she said. “For a romantic, Paul had very little imagination.”
“I never thought of him as a romantic,” Hoffmann said. “Of course he wanted to marry you, so . . .” He relaxed: the funeral had taken more out of him than he had expected. “Was that ever going to be possible?” he asked.
“He thought so. He thought he had earned it. Paul believed that pain was payment. He’d suffered, so now he deserved to be happy.”
“Well, you made him happy,” Hoffmann said. “Or at least you made him less unhappy.”
“Did I? I helped him to stop feeling sorry for himself and to stop being angry with everyone else. And I showed him a lot of dying men, so he could see that war is not adventure and that pain is not payment, because it buys nothing. He didn’t believe me,” she added.
“He really shouldn’t have gone on that raid,” Hoffmann said. “It was bound to be dangerous.”
“Oh well. Isn’t that why he went? Men are always killing themselves to prove their manhood.”
/>
“What Max would call a self-inflicted wound,” Hoffmann said sadly.
“At least Paul made a thorough job of it,” she said. “At least he didn’t come back and expect me to help him finish it for him. He was kind enough to spare me that.”
Her words sounded strangely flat. Hoffmann looked, and saw that her eyes were drenched with tears. He felt clumsy and inadequate; he searched for a helpful answer and found none, so in the end he said what he thought. “You loved him, didn’t you?” he said.
“He was such a middle-aged child. I shall always miss him.”
She finished her drink. They parted and went back to work. Two days later she left Benghazi for Milan.
There were no more raids on the Takoradi Trail. Fanny Barton got made up to wing commander, but he did not get a DSO; he went to Rhodesia and took over a Flying Training School. Hick Hooper returned to the US Army Air Force and enjoyed his war. Pip Patterson survived. Skull got posted to a bomber squadron in Egypt; after all, he knew something about bombers.
Hornet Squadron was re-formed with a fresh batch of pilots. Kellaway had recovered his wits so he stayed on as adjutant. “Chaps come and go,” he told the new Intelligence Officer, “but the squadron never dies.”
That was in May 1942. One month later, Rommel’s advance had carried him so deep into Egypt that he was within a day’s drive of Cairo when he was finally checked at El Alamein. By November 1942 the German army had been soundly defeated there. It began a retreat that was to cover more than a thousand miles, through Egypt and Libya, to Tunisia. In May 1943 the last German soldiers in North Africa surrendered. On September 4, 1943, Italy was invaded and Allied armies were on the mainland of Europe. The Desert Air Force and the SAS went with them. They fought until the war was won, on May 7, 1945.
THE END
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A Good Clean Fight Page 54
