The Burning Sky

by Jack Ludlow

‘Don’t you have gardens in America?’

  ‘I was referring, Mrs Mason, to the lands south of the Panama Canal.’

  Jardine wondered why the laconic American was looking so pointedly at him, so he responded. ‘Don’t you mean the Rio Grande?’

  ‘I stand corrected.’

  ‘M?’ Mason said, with a slight lift of the brow.

  ‘Quite; time for we ladies to withdraw.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To let the men have their cigars and tell risqué stories, Miss Littleton.’

  ‘I like a cigar, and if there are any filthy stories around, count me in.’

  ‘Truly,’ Jardine joked, in a reference to the tune played by the British troops who surrendered at Yorktown, ‘the world turned upside down.’

  That interjection, by the girl from Boston, put paid to any passing round the port and telling jokes: she stayed put and so did Margery Mason. Peydon told a story of being out on exercises in Egypt and setting up a small supply dump – food, petrol and the like – which the troops slept round.

  ‘They woke up in the morning to find everything gone, with no one, including the pickets doing two-on-four-off guard duty, hearing a thing.’

  Jardine topped that by telling of a time in Iraq when the locals, in the course of one night, dismantled and stole a small steam engine from the inside of a camp with only one guarded main gate and with mobile patrols on the perimeter fence.

  ‘And they did not drive it out either: the rails went through that main gate, so they must have taken it to bits. When it comes to theft the Arabs are peerless.’

  Corrie Littleton was on a mission to persuade her mother to leave Abyssinia. Engaged in writing a treatise on comparative religions, Littleton mère was in the old Ethiopian capital of Gondar, digging around in the archives for connections to Judaism and Christianity. She also knew that in nearby Aksum, the fabled home of the Queen of Sheba, was supposed to reside the Ark of the Covenant. The trouble was, for her daughter, that Ethiopia was, right now, for non-natives, a hard place to get into.

  ‘If the guineas are going to invade, it’s not a good place for Mother to be.’

  ‘For “guineas” read “Italians”,’ Alverson explained.

  ‘Gangsters,’ cried Grace, as though it were an accolade. ‘Little Caesar.’

  ‘And what, Mr Alverson, are your reasons for being hereabouts?’

  ‘Chasing stories, Mr Jardine, which is what I do. I wanted to get into Abyssinia without going through the normal channels or to where everyone is being sent.’ Responding to a raised eyebrow, he added, ‘Right now there are correspondents from all over the world sitting in Addis Ababa drinking on their employer’s tab and filing nothing of interest. They ask to go up to the north where the Italians are massed and they are told no; they ask to have a look-see at the borderlands with Italian Somaliland, same answer. So, I decided on a little wandering in the hope of having something to tell my readers back home, but your Limey governor stopped me.’

  ‘And your newspaper is?’

  ‘Syndicated, Mr Jardine. I am reporting for half the papers in the States.’

  ‘Which grants you a rather large budget, I am given to understand,’ Mason remarked.

  ‘It does, but that has yet to translate into any hard news. The Ethiopians are sitting on everything, because they think if we report on the Italian military we will also report on them.’

  ‘A reasonable assumption?’ asked Jardine.

  ‘It is, but they are not really helping their cause. This is David versus Goliath, and the more that is stated the better the chance of some of the Western powers ganging up to stop Mussolini.’

  ‘You’re in the know, Mr Jardine,’ said Grace. ‘Any chance of that?’

  ‘I think you overrate my position, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Just what is your position, Mr Jardine?’ Alverson asked, with his deceptive drawl. There was nothing indolent about his look now.

  ‘No shop talk, Mr Alverson,’ Mason said quickly. ‘It is a rule we British tend towards imposing on our guests. Time for coffee, I think. Tell me, Miss Littleton, why are you here in our bailiwick if you need to get to Ethiopia to find your mother?’

  ‘Well, I figure you will be less stuffy than the French.’

  ‘No problem in that regard,’ boomed Peydon. ‘Damned Frogs, begging your pardon Mrs Mason, and, of course, you, young lady.’

  ‘They would not let me cross the border,’ she continued in that rather fetching cracked voice, giving the captain a look that wondered what was wrong with the odd damnation. ‘And there is no point, no point at all, in trying to get into Abyssinia through Eritrea.’ She rolled her eyes then. ‘The Italians won’t even take a bribe, my God, so worried are they that little old me might tell the world about their silly dispositions.’

  ‘And you hope to make your way from here?’

  ‘I do.’

  Mason pulled a face. ‘I think I might have to disappoint you as well. The governor has instructions from Whitehall to keep the border sealed, as, no doubt, Mr Alverson has already informed you. Odd, you two fellow countrymen ending up here at the same time.’

  ‘Country folk will do, Mr Mason. I am not a man.’

  That got a look that rendered the statement questionable. ‘Where will you go now, Mr Alverson?’

  It was a delight to Jardine the way the American responded: he very likely had a plan but he was not about to let on. ‘Mr Mason, I will go to Aden, if I go anywhere.’

  ‘Thank you, Mason, for a splendid evening,’ said the army captain, standing up. ‘But reveille is at six and I have to be sharp eyes or the men won’t polish their boots.’

  ‘But they are barefoot, Captain Peydon,’ said his hostess, on her face a look that could only be described as gormless.

  ‘Figure of speech, Mrs M.’

  ‘Oh!’

  It was a signal for the break-up of the evening and, in truth, Jardine was pleased: he had been travelling and was bushed. On top of that, he needed to make a quick trip up the coast to Zeila and have a look before Grace headed that way in his patrol boat. Everyone was on their feet now, saying their goodbyes, not that they were going far, only to one of the other hilltop bungalows. Jardine was therefore a little surprised when Alverson got in between him and the other guests and spoke to him softly.

  ‘I wonder if we could have a little stroll, clear the head before hitting the sack?’ Jardine picked up immediately it was not so much a request as a requirement, which made him wary. ‘There’s a couple of things I think we could talk about to advantage.’

  ‘Whose advantage?’

  ‘Let’s start with mutual.’

  ‘I’m pretty tired.’

  ‘If I said “Chaco War”, would that give you a boost?’

  ‘You coming, Tyler?’ Corrie Littleton called, which had Jardine give him an enquiring look.

  ‘When she turned up here I offered her a room,’ he said softly, before calling back, ‘I’m going to take some air, honey, and Mr Jardine is going to join me, I hope.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Jardine responded.

  ‘Maybe I should join you,’ she said. Alverson swung round slowly; he did not say anything, but whatever he imparted had to be in the look, as her face altered, showing doubt bordering on hurt. ‘Maybe not, I’m worn out.’

  Mason touched Jardine’s arm. ‘Before you go to your slumbers, there’s something I need you to do. In my study.’

  Jardine nodded, then passing the boys clearing up, he said goodnight to M and went out onto the veranda with Alverson. The night was cool and would get more so as the clear sky sucked the heat up into the atmosphere, but right now it was pleasant. Alverson walked away from the house, taking his time in lighting a cigar so that they were out of earshot before he spoke.

  ‘First thing I’d like to say, Mr Jardine, is that I am no peace lover, but then nor am I too fond of war, having seen the consequences from time to time.’

  ‘In Paraguay?’

 
‘And Bolivia – I covered both sides. I also know that there was a League of Nations arms embargo, though that proved to be pretty porous.’

  ‘It might be advantageous to get to the point, Mr Alverson.’

  That got a smile, which was picked up by the moon and starlight, because there was no anger in Jardine’s voice: it was even and controlled.

  ‘Let’s just say your name rings a bell, shall we, and it occurs that, since we are on the edge of a country with another of these League embargoes in place, it might turn out to be just as porous.’

  ‘And if it was, what would you do about it?’

  ‘Why, take advantage, Mr Jardine, what else? I am looking for a story.’

  ‘I might not be one.’

  ‘And I might be Al Jolson without make-up. Let me level with you. I want not just to get into Abyssinia, but to get to where the action is.’

  ‘And you think I can take you there?’

  ‘I am guessing you can. I could get back to Addis, and quick as that through the Sudan.’ He clicked his fingers and drew deeply on his cigar. ‘But sitting on my ass drinking whisky is not my style. You are a man who runs guns and I picked up on what you did in South America.’

  ‘I could be acting on behalf of the British Government.’

  ‘You’re not, and the way Mason changed the subject was like semaphore. All I am asking is to come along with whatever it is you are up to, at my own risk and on my own dollar.’

  ‘What do I get out of it?’

  ‘Good company.’

  Jardine laughed. Alverson would not say he might blow the gaff on the whole thing, but he could with one telegram, and it was not malice. He was a reporter and they reported, while no appeal to his better nature was likely to cut much ice.

  ‘Let me think about it. I’ll talk to you in the morning.’

  ‘Suits me,’ came the reply. Alverson knew ‘yes’ when he heard it.

  Mason was, as he said, in his study, the only jarring note that one of his boys was there too.

  ‘Don’t worry about Rani, he speaks little English.’ He pointed to his desk, on which lay a piece of paper with the Colonial Office crest, really the British crown with the necessary departmental embellishments.

  ‘I have forged for you a set of orders from London, instructions to me to give you every cooperation. It has at the bottom the name of one of the undersecretaries who is a new appointment, so I would not know his signature. Please sign it in his name so that, should things go wrong, I am covered. I have no desire to lose my post.’

  Mason could not help looking at his boy and that said everything. He was a homosexual, probably with a preference for the young, and out here he was safe to indulge his tastes, with the added advantage that his paramours were damned attractive and, given his position, no doubt numerous. It had been in those fleeting glances at the dinner table and, once realised, in the man’s gestures, which were slightly fastidious.

  It was possible that his proclivities were the spur to make him act as he was doing, sympathy for the natives overriding his sense of duty to his office. Jardine was not bothered, nor was he in the least bit disgusted: what people did in the privacy of their own bedroom was no concern of his.

  What revolted him was hating people for their colour or their bloodline, torturing them and depriving them of the right to a decent life because of their race. The Jews of Hamburg, with their mordant humour, would loudly proclaim their thanks to the Lord they were not homosexual, Gypsies, Communists or mad, for life would be intolerable: the Nazi state hated them more than Semites.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, looked at the name, picked up the pen and signed with a flourish.

  The noise that woke him was slight, but a life of danger makes any such disturbance a matter of concern, doubly so given he was in what should be a safe place. There was a zephyr of breeze as his mosquito net was pulled aside and the bed dropped as another body got in. About to hit out, he was stopped as a hand searched for his cock, the untoward thought that it might be Mason unavoidable. Yet his own hand touching flesh, looking for the throat, brushed a breast, and that told him the body was female and a vision of Corrie Littleton filled his mind at the same time as blood filled his tugged-at penis.

  That outstretched hand, the size of the mammary, plus a sort of snuffling sound gave him the first intimation he was mistaken, that and the sheer force with which he was dragged into full body contact. Part of his mind was telling him to resist, to insist Margery Mason get out of his bed, but her incessant tugging and the fact that an erect cock had no conscience overrode his scruples. Their coupling was swift, grunting, and for her, judging by her rising then choked-off whimpering, deeply satisfying.

  Cal Jardine could not deny he was pleasured too, but when she was gone and he lay back to go to sleep, he also felt like a Boy Scout who had performed his good deed for the day.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The choke point for the MS Tarvita was Port Said, where there was a British garrison guarding the entrance to the Suez Canal. That was the means by which Mussolini had reinforced his troops in Eritrea and Somaliland, and was still supplying them, given the colonies the Italians occupied could not easily feed his armies. Howls of protest in the democracies from those opposed to Italy fell on deaf ears; Britain could have choked off the whole Abyssinian operation by one simple stroke: the banning of military equipment from using the canal.

  Vince was enjoying himself, using the deck as a mobile running track, finding things on the ship to use as weights, teaching boxing to some of the hands, who were of a dozen nationalities; whatever it was, he was outdoors. Having started off a bright pink in the Black Sea and itching from sunburn, that soon changed; he had been in the Middle East before, and given his Italian bloodline he soon began to turn brown, seeming to get palpably darker by the day.

  Peter Lanchester stayed out of the sun as much as he could, spending his time in the shade trying to read Marcel Proust, an endeavour he had promised himself he would undertake as soon as he had time. There was nothing for them to do on the boat – the captain sailed her, he had a woman to cook for them and plenty of supplies, while the crew were pleasant fellows who tried very hard to speak with both him and Vince in fractured English.

  Both could only wonder at how Cal Jardine was doing, but given they had no way of knowing, it was not a thing to fret on. Sailing on a sound vessel with reasonable accommodation across a blue Mediterranean Sea in midsummer, it was best to treat it as what it was: a cruise. With the coast of Egypt on the horizon, that came to an end, and the tension increased as the twin minarets of the Grand Fouad Mosque became clear, piercing the sky across from the muggy sky of Port Said.

  In the end it was a formality: the canal was under British oversight but it was a commercial enterprise and profit was the primary concern, not the seeking of contraband. From Istanbul Lanchester had organised the payment of the necessary tonnage dues to the Suez Canal Company, and this was a British cargo being moved in a hired foreign bottom, in other words, commonplace and not worth a search. Soon Lanchester was back to A la Recherche du Temps Perdu and Vince was back to his running, boxing and browning, this time with desert sand on either side of the vessel instead of sparkling sea.

  * * *

  Zeila made Berbera look like a sort of paradise: if it had been a major port once there was scant evidence of it now. A scruffy town of dilapidated buildings, surrounded by a low mud wall, it reeked of no sanitation and loss, the only boats plying any sort of trade a few Arab dhows, while most were tied up in harbour or dragged out of the water altogether on to the beach, some of them now too rotten to take to the water.

  The outer roads, a mile and a half offshore, so slight was the fall of the seabed, were empty. There was an official resident here, a bachelor, but no troops or other Europeans. He had gone home on sick leave, hardly surprising given the flyblown quality of the place. Being here on one’s own would be nothing less than soul-destroying.

  It had been with so
me trepidation that Jardine had emerged to take breakfast, after his usual morning exercises and a long and satisfying shower. He found Mason already up and at his desk, which, rather worryingly, left him with the wife and dreading a repeat of what had happened in the hours of darkness. Her attitude was remarkable: there was not the slightest hint of what she had done the night before, no change in either her awkward behaviour or her proneness to inappropriate remarks; the subject was not even alluded to in a look.

  That left Jardine wondering if she was a sleepwalker – it was possible, but in the end he decided, with her husband in another bed probably every night and with a different companion, she, with an appetite to be sated, took her pleasure where she could find it, with the caveat that she would avoid congress with a native for fear of scandal.

  That word gave him pause – if Whitehall found out what Conrad Mason was doing they would drum him out of the Colonial Service, yet it seemed that many people knew. Peydon, for one, was certainly aware, hence his reaction to gormless Grace, and was that the real reason for his troubled relationship with the local Anglican divine?

  Those were thoughts to be put aside. He had come to Zeila by boat, sailing up the coast in a hired dhow, no problem now he knew that Grace had sailed for Aden at first light, so he and his patrol boat were well past the place. Peydon was busy at his barracks organising his trip into the desert; Jardine had passed by to hear much frustrated shouting and the honking of camels.

  By his calculation, if everything had gone well, his weapons would be in the Suez Canal only a few days’ sailing away. His task was to organise the unloading, which would have to be into boats, probably those dhows rotting in the harbour.

  Mason, having taken over the sick fellow’s duties, had given him the name of a contact, Jamal Cabdille Xasan, a local worthy who had once been prosperous but had suffered the same fate as the place in which he resided. If there was one decent dwelling in the town it was his, but that only became apparent once Jardine was through the doors and into the cool and columned courtyard. Having introduced himself, Xasan sent for a man to interpret their conversation.