Smiling Willie and the Tiger

by John Harris

  ‘I’ve got it,’ the Tiger said.

  Willie fidgeted a little. ‘Not very comfortable,’ he said thoughtfully.

  ‘It’ll be the saddle,’ the Tiger said importantly. ‘You ought to lower it.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Willie agreed. ‘Try it for size, Tiger.’

  The Tiger ought to have known better. Without thinking, he cocked a leg over the saddle. He could see the three girls – miles below him, clutching each other in terror. He was still waving to them as Willie released the brake.

  Thirteen

  ‘Was anybody hurt?’ the Tiger asked faintly from his bed in the tin-and-wood hospital at Winifred where they had carried him. He lay on his back, staring at the roof and looking vaguely as though he’d been embalmed.

  ‘Not many, old chap,’ Willie said gaily. ‘Just a couple of army chaps who got in the way.’

  He helped himself to one of the grapes he’d brought and whistled a tune from The Belle of New York.‘Turned out to be that Javert chap. Him and his sergeant. Otherwise, all went as merry as wedding bells and no damage done.’

  The Tiger stared down at his leg. It was held rigidly in place by splints and bandages. ‘Except to me,’ he said. ‘Is it broken?’

  ‘Well’ – Willie gestured – ‘a little.’

  ‘How can it be broken a little?’ the Tiger bleated. ‘It’s either broken or it isn’t.’

  ‘More of a crack, you might say, but the doctor doesn’t seem to know your leg from your arm, so I wouldn’t believe him. Damn bicycle carried away three layers of seats and went clean through the side of the tent. Fearful uproar.’

  The Tiger brooded on the news for a moment. ‘How long am I in here for?’ he asked.

  ‘Not much longer.’

  ‘Who’s paying?’

  ‘Poll. Told her the old, old story. Laughed no end. Thought she’d split her sides.’ Willie popped away another grape and looked at the Tiger.

  The Tiger caught the glance and was immediately suspicious. ‘What about Pansy?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s all right,’ Willie said cheerfully. ‘Poser’s looking after her. He said he’d take care of her and Poll seems happy about it.’

  The Tiger fought to sit up. ‘When do I get out of here?’ he said.

  Willie beamed. ‘Now, old chap.’

  ‘Now?’ The Tiger stopped struggling and stared at him.

  ‘The Poser’s outside now with a cart. Didn’t want to come. Thought you ought to stay longer.’

  ‘Why have I got to go now?’ the Tiger wailed.

  ‘Like this…’ Willie helped himself to another grape. ‘Bit tiresome. Up a gum tree a little. That officer feller’s due out of hospital this afternoon. Expect he’ll start making enquiries. Shockin’ bad form the way he follows us about.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  Willie cleared his throat. ‘Veldt,’ he said.

  ‘Again?With a broken leg?’

  ‘Won’t harm. You can sleep in the cart.’

  ‘What about Pansy?’ The Tiger’s voice came in a thin shriek of indignation.

  ‘Army’s been watching the house. Found her name or something. Got rooms for you in Brandewyn for when we come back.’

  The Tiger sank back. Their movements seemed worse than the wanderings of the Children of Israel. In the last few months he could hardly remember a time that he’d awakened and found himself satisfied, much less pleased, with where he was.

  ‘Cheap and all that,’ Willie pointed out. ‘Benefit us all.’

  The Tiger looked at him suspiciously. ‘All?’

  Willie popped the last of the grapes in his mouth and smiled, the sunniest of optimists. ‘Me and the Poser’ll be moving in with you.’

  Mace, a large sticking plaster over one eye and a portion of his scalp removed by a splintered plank seat, stared across his desk at Instant. Instant’s wrist was heavily bandaged.

  ‘No luck, sir,’ Instant said.

  ‘What do you mean, by luck?’

  ‘When I went round to the ’ospital he’d gone.’

  Mace picked up a pile of papers and slammed them to the desk. The witches’ sabbath in the circus tent at Standerton had unnerved him. The papers burst into a fluttering snowstorm and settled to the floor. Instant began to pick them up.

  ‘Leave them alone, God damn it!’ Mace roared. ‘How did they get out of the tent, blast it? There were men at every entrance.’

  Instant stared back at him. There were still numerous splinters about his person.

  ‘That bicycle took out the three top rows of seats, sir,’ he pointed out in aggrieved tones. ‘And they took the side of the tent out. The ’ole bloody lot came down on us. You want to remember you was unconscious by then. It left a great rip in the canvas you could have drove a train through. They went out through there.’

  ‘God damn and blast!’ Mace decided that fate was against him. ‘Did you enquire where they went from the hospital?’

  ‘They’d given an address, sir, but it was the wrong one.’

  ‘But of course!’

  ‘I found out from the hotel, though, that one of them – the chap on the bicycle, the one they call the Tiger – he’d set up home with a woman.’

  ‘Hah!’ Mace felt better at once. ‘Cherchez la femme!’

  ‘Pardon, sir.’

  ‘Nothing. Go on.’

  ‘We ’ad her name. I made enquiries. She’s Poll’s niece. She didn’t work in the knocking shop – I mean, in Poll’s establishment. She wasn’t that type at all.’

  ‘Go on, man, go on!’ Mace had spent seven days in hospital, four of them unconscious, and he was restless and eager to carry the war into the enemy’s camp again. ‘Where was this home they’d set up?’

  ‘In Winifred, sir.’

  ‘Winifred? Under our blasted noses?’

  ‘Yessir. But I found it all right.’

  ‘Instant,’ Mace said warmly, ‘I’m sorry I was so brusque with you. You’ve done well. How did you unearth all this?’

  Instant coughed. ‘I ’ad a word with a young lady, sir.’

  Mace’s smile died. ‘Oh, you did, did you?’

  Instant was unmoved by his frown. ‘Business with pleasure, you might say, sir.’

  ‘Might I, by God?’ Mace decided that if Instant could afford to indulge himself with young ladies on a sergeant’s pay, what he was up to in his spare time needed looking into.

  Instant smiled nostalgically. He was quite untroubled by thoughts of exposure. His tracks to the freight-carrier’s were well covered. ‘Pretty little thing, sir,’ he said. ‘Rare performer, too.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, man,’ Mace said in a low vicious voice. ‘Get on with it.’

  ‘Pal of a pal of this Tiger’s girl, sir, she was.’

  ‘Never mind who she was. Did you go round to the house?’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Find the girl there? Question her?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Why not, man!’

  ‘She’d left.’

  Instant struggled to keep his face straight as he saw Mace fighting to hang on to his temper. His face went red and his acne seemed to boil. Mace had changed a lot in the last few months. From being a stiff, honest, humourless man he had become a living symbol of vengeance, and his temper had suffered accordingly. As a result, for some time now, Instant had found that a great deal of fun was to be obtained from the way he made his reports. He didn’t even have to tell any untruths. Just rearrange things in a way that reduced Mace to speechlessness.

  ‘Do – you – mean – to – say’ – Mace was sitting bolt upright now, his face scarlet, his voice thick – ‘that we’ve lost the buggers again?’

  Instant permitted himself a supercilious smile. Really, he thought, this feller Mace didn’t half need looking after.

  ‘No sir, we ain’t. I’m coming to that.’

  Mace glared. ‘Well, for God’s sake, come to it!’

  ‘My friend’s friend’ – Instant’s sm
ile was smug and superior – ‘she’d ’ad a letter from this girl of the Tiger’s. She’s given up her job at Poll’s, y’see, sir – I enquired about that, of course…’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘–and she was writing asking for some of ’er things to be looked after till she could collect them.’

  ‘Any address?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Instant smiled again. ‘But it was posted in Brandewyn.’

  ‘Brandewyn?’ Mace’s eyes narrowed as the fever of the chase caught him at once. ‘They never move away, do they? Did she say anything else? Anything that would help.’

  ‘No, sir. Except that she was a bit narked. The whole bleeden lot was living with ’er. It was all in the letter, sir. This young lady read it out to this young lady I was – er – was with. She told me about it.’

  ‘I hoped you paid her well for her services to England,’ Mace said sarcastically. ‘What else did your informant have to say?’

  Instant smiled. ‘Seems that when this feller the Tiger turned up again out of the hospital he was so narked he upped and moved her out smartly. Moonlight flit, you might say. They’ve set up ’ome somewhere else now.’

  Mace stared. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘they move around faster than De Wet. Where?’

  ‘She was careful not to say, sir. But it seems now that two of ’em are on the loose and the third one’s ’oled up somewhere else with his little bit of fluff.’

  Mace stared at Instant. ‘Where’s the map?’ he demanded.

  Instant coughed. ‘We lost it, sir. Private Wooden inadvertently used it to light a fire.’

  Mace shot upright again. He suddenly remembered that Wooden was the last man he’d spoken to in the circus tent and that it was Wooden who’d directed him to the gap in the crowded seats. In the daze of concussion he’d forgotten.

  ‘By God!’ he said. ‘Wooden!’

  ‘Pardon, sir.’

  ‘Get rid of that man, Instant!’ Mace said with a quite unbelievable viciousness.

  ‘Yessir.’ Instant was unperturbed. He’d been expecting something of the sort. ‘Where to, sir?’

  Mace searched his mind for some unit which hadn’t yet had Wooden on its personnel sheet. Then he remembered something General Wickover had said.

  ‘Engineers!’ he said. ‘There’s a balloon unit with General Wickover! They’re short of men. Send him there. Perhaps he’ll fall out of the basket. Arrange it.’ He smiled and went on with what he considered consummate cunning. ‘Make him a corporal, Instant. They’ll probably think he’s some use. I’ll put him up for another skater at once.’

  ‘Right, sir.’ Instant smiled. Mace was back on form.

  ‘Now’ – Mace was throwing papers out of his valise – ‘I had a small map somewhere. Typical of this bloody war. The only decent map we ever had came from some kopje-walloper in Kimberley who used it to mark his claims.’

  He produced a small crudely drawn map he’d made and, spreading it on the desk, began to read the names of the towns surrounding Chichester Junction along the Little Reef.

  ‘Paradise. Dreifontein. Balmerinostad. Brandewyn. Amerika. Middenstad – God! Mimosa Grove. Power Hamlet. Corneliusdal. St Helena. Winifred.’ He almost groaned. ‘They could be in any one of those places, Instant.’ He paused, stared, then slapped the map. ‘By God,’ he said. ‘Notice anything, Instant?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Look at the map, man. Take Chichester Junction as the centre. All the other places these people keep turning up are never further than twenty miles from it. What does that suggest Instant?’

  ‘That we’ve got a bleeden job keeping our eye on ’em all at once, sir.’

  ‘No, man! Think! These fellers never move far away. What does that suggest?’

  Instant’s face was straight, but he permitted himself a little humour at Mace’s expense. ‘That they’re ’ome-sick, sir?’

  ‘No, you fool!’ Mace was suddenly excited. ‘It means that they did hide the loot somewhere here – in Chichester Junction, just as I always thought. I bet.’

  It didn’t appear to be of world-shattering importance to Instant. Chichester Junction was the biggest town of the lot and hundreds of people had been digging foundations and building and laying roads for weeks. If they hadn’t turned up the missing pay, he thought, he couldn’t see much chance of Mace, with the help of Instant, Wooden and a few others, doing so.

  ‘Yes sir,’ – he agreed. ‘How do you suggest we go about finding it?’

  ‘We don’t.’ Mace spoke in a low voice. ‘We go on sitting. Tell Mr Glover I want his sentries put back. On the Bloemfontein road. By the bridge. By the war memorial and on the railway.’

  ‘That’s a lot of sentries, sir.’ Instant frowned. He knew what Glover was going to say. It had been obvious for some time that Glover suspected that Mace was mad and he knew, when Glover lost his temper, who was going to catch it full in the face.

  Mace failed to notice his dismay. He was sitting back, smiling. ‘We just go on sitting tight, Instant,’ he said. ‘We just keep on keeping on. The army’s motto. That’s what we do. Sooner or later one of these chaps’ll make a mistake.’

  ‘Yessir.’ Instant spoke maliciously. ‘But time’s running out a bit, isn’t it? They’ll be sending us ’ome soon, won’t they, now the war’s over.’

  Fourteen

  The knowledge that the end of the war had not cooled Mace’s ardour had been a bigger shock than Willie had allowed to show when he had visited the Tiger in hospital.

  They had happily expected that with the end of hostilities the army would cry ‘Enough!’ and hurry home, leaving them with nothing to do but pick up the buried loot, move somewhere worthwhile like the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town and start to live like lords. Unfortunately, it didn’t appear to be working out that way.

  After a brief, dusty and uncomfortable sojourn on the veldt, miles from anywhere, Willie had taken up residence with Fish in yet another common lodging house in Winifred. The bugs were almost as big as tomcats, his remittance was long spent, Fish’s pawned gun had been eaten, and the Tiger, defying anything Poll might do since he had spirited Pansy away in the middle of the night, kept carefully to himself, as silent as the grave about his new hideaway. With Willie’s Dutch storekeeper reporting that Mace was now quietly back at Sinai waiting for them to make a move, he had gone to see Mendel as soon as his leg had healed and was busy again in the little trap drawn by the lop-eared limping pony, moving warily among the tents, huts and debris heaps on the safe side of Winifred, allowing the pony to find its own way on a loose rein and stop of its own accord at his regular customers.

  Fish was disconsolate enough to be talking about returning to the States. ‘That goddam Tiger’s behavin’ just plain selfish,’ he complained.

  ‘Jealous, shouldn’t wonder,’ Willie said, gloomily washing a collar in a bucket in the backyard of the lodging house.

  Fish lit the butt-end of a cigar. ‘We – got – to – lift – that – dough,’ he said in desperation. He tossed away the cigar butt. It tasted like burning shellac. ‘We could take a train to Bussum,’ he said. ‘Just to look the place over. Hire us a coupla horses and cut across country to the railway line and hit the place from the south.’

  He had borrowed a pound from Poll and, not very willingly, Willie allowed himself to be pushed on to a dusty train to Bussum where the line looped far to the south. There they hired a pair of moth-eaten horses and had a drink before they set off.

  ‘One of us goes in to spy out the land,’ Willie said.

  ‘OK. Who?’

  ‘Let the flies decide.’

  The flies decided Fish and they set off across the rocky plain towards Chichester Junction. Over on their right, as they moved among the willows on the river bank, they could see the roofs of the junction shimmering in the sun, with the Kaffir shanty town of Shakespeare, where the railway labourers lived, away on their right. Moving warily, they spotted the small tent under the eucalyptus trees nea
r the Bushmansdorp road and the three men in uniform who were standing guard.

  ‘They’ve still got the sentries out!’ Willie sounded shocked at what he seemed to consider perfidy on the part of the authorities.

  Fish grunted his disgust and swung his horse round to head for Shakespeare while, from the shade of the willows, Willie idly watched the khaki-clad figures in the distance tearing down the barbed-wire fences erected during the war. It was not until the sun began to sink in a golden-green haze shot with scarlet and blue that Fish reappeared. He seemed in a hurry.

  ‘I saw that bastard Mace,’ he said as he hauled on the reins.

  He had been turning into Nicholson Street just as Mace was heading through the town towards Roscoff and Emma, where he’d heard of a man answering to the description of the Tiger riding about the diggings in a pony-and-trap. They had passed within yards of each other, but Mace had been deep in thought, frowning at a spot between his horse’s ears, and he had never noticed Fish in the growing traffic of the town.

  Fish had not stayed. Panic-stricken, he had wheeled his horse at once and departed the way he had arrived, through the back streets to avoid the main roads, and between the shanties of Shakespeare.

  ‘The goddam place was full of troops,’ he said. ‘All going home.’

  Willie rubbed his nose. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Lot of building round the railway, that’s all. They’ve got the new line open towards Kimberley and new shunting yards and a new engine shed. There’s a new hotel and they’ve paved Nicholson Street, and there’s a whole new set of offices for the railway company in Wonderkop Street. The goddam place’s knee-deep in planks and corrugated iron. They’re even putting up brick buildings.’ Fish scowled. ‘Brick,’ he repeated. ‘For Christ’s sake, what are we coming to?’

  Fish’s gloom grew deeper every day. One day he talked of going home and the next tried to pump the Tiger about Pansy’s whereabouts, his mind still full of ideas of ravishment. But the Tiger was cleverer than his freckled oval face and blinking sandy lashes suggested. He was no match for Willie, but he was a whole lot cleverer than Fish. He’d persuaded Pansy to give up her job at Poll’s and, saying nothing to anyone about where he kept her, he was careful to make sure he wasn’t followed, sometimes even sitting in Poll’s bar until Fish grew weary of waiting.