Red Joker

by Michael Nicholson

  They left the hotel, pushing their way past Russians, Bulgarians, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese and Koreans in the front reception foyer and zig-zagged through the car park to Freddy’s car. It was a white two-seater open MG, paint flaking and rusty. It had been left to Freddy by a family friend just before he had been arrested on charges of economic sabotage and actions contrary to the spirit of the Revolution. He had died of malnutrition in the Machava Penitentiary three days before his fortieth birthday.

  ‘I’m surprised they tolerate your reactionary imperialist transport, Freddy.’

  ‘They’ve no choice. So little moves on four wheels here they daren’t take this off the road just because it reminds them of the Raj. Anyway it won’t be running much longer, number four big end’s knocking. It probably won’t last out the week. It’s very sad,’ he said. And he looked it.

  He eased the stick into gear and with a squeal from the rear tyres the MG bounced over the tarmac ramps on to the road that would take them into the airport and then Maputo for beer and king prawns. Freddy, his head sideways to the steering wheel, listened to engine noises. The South African, his knees braced hard against the dashboard, was thinking of the black guy in the red skullcap and the flight after lunch to the island of Union.

  Faraday watched it manoeuvre its way carefully through the deep-water channel between the harbour wall and the reef, moving very slowly, still under sail, with hardly a ripple at its bows. It seemed only to crease the water and he had never realized before how gentle a yacht could be. He watched its red-brown Terylene sails flutter slightly as the breeze hesitated and saw them billow full again as the wind picked up.

  Faraday knew nothing of the sea or sea-going things but as the yacht came closer he realized it was not the plaything of a wealthy owner.

  He could see patches sewn into the mainsail that had still to be bleached by the sun and salt air, and the Plimsoll line that divided the varnished mahogany from the red anti-foul paint was broken and uneven. A man’s blue shirt and two pairs of blue trousers were pegged to the forward rigging.

  He saw children on deck and a man standing by the mast holding fishing rods, facing out to sea, his back turned.

  Faraday walked into the shadow of Governor Chaudenson as the yacht passed and the children saw him and began waving. He waved back and they began shrieking with laughter. And then he saw the girl, low down in the cockpit, both hands on the wheel and so brown she might easily have been a mulatto except she had the longest, blondest hair Faraday had ever seen. And she too waved and began laughing. It was as if someone aboard had said something funny and possibly about him.

  Then, with the yacht less than forty yards away, the man at the mast turned and he too waved, and Faraday was looking at President Albert Laurent.

  As the yacht moved into the still waters of the harbour, another man appeared through a forward hatch and began winching down the foresail. Then Faraday saw the yacht’s name painted in white across the stem and he smiled and remembered Prentice’s bedroom story of the Marxist Professor who had abandoned his Revolutionary Island . . . to go fishing with his children on a scruffy yacht called Killing of Sister George, skippered by a girl Faraday knew for certain he would see again.

  The Killing of Sister George was owned by an Englishman, Adam Pilger. He was forty-nine years old and his arrival on Union two years earlier had been, in his own words, the final dot on the ‘i’ of a long and extraordinary career, the final cross of the ‘t’. A career so varied and so often bizarre that he found it difficult at times of nostalgic recollection to believe he was that same person.

  He had been truck driver, nurse, civil righter, soldier, sailor, alternating richman, poorman, sometime beggar- man, profiteer, trawlerman. His adventures had begun as a Legionnaire and ended twenty-five years later as a bounty- hunter.

  He joined the French Foreign Legion the day after his eighteenth birthday, departing his public school. Downside, in the traditional manner: abruptly and with the farewell letter of explanation, quoting Rupert Brooke propped up on the mantelpiece. His reasons had seemed sound enough then though many times since he had regretted his teenage haste. But now that his career was about to turn full circle, that decision in his bleak school dormitory seemed somehow the right and only thing to have done. Certainly a better option than to have embarked upon the career his earnest father had planned for him in the family’s motor accessory business.

  The French Legion, despite its legends, was a disappointment. The cosmetics of Hollywood, he soon realized, had done a dreadful disservice to scores of spirited young men who turned up at Camp Raffali in Corsica for training. Expected romance was stillborn and the island’s sand dunes were as near as he ever got to the deserts and brave flags of the garrison forts of Arabia. He survived the brutality of training to become a Legionnaire, head shaven, body raw and with the determination to desert just as soon as there was the opportunity. It was not to present itself for another two years and in that time, although he killed no one, he was taught thoroughly how to, saw no combat and was thankful, made no friendships, despite the myth of camaraderie, and was thankful for that too. But those two years did determine much of what he was later to become. It pulled up every root he might have had with his family in England, destroyed ties, however frail, with the system he had been born into, and made him so buoyantly individual that he became as light and as directionless as flotsam, to spend the rest of his life drifting wherever a current or a chance breeze took him.

  He was eventually taken many places. Once he drove a 1927 Lagonda from Perth to Cape Town advertising whisky. He had crewed on the Whitbread Round-the-World Yacht Race, had soldiered for the Sultan of Oman flushing out Dhofari Rebels, had been one of five mercenaries of a landing party of forty-five who had survived an abortive coup in Equatorial Guinea. In between these military adventures he had driven safari parties by minibus overland to Katmandu.

  Once he had come close to making a profit, buying Range-Rovers in Birmingham and driving them to the Middle East to sell to Arabs at five times their British price. But his entire fleet of seven was suddenly commandeered by Palestinians in Beirut and converted to machinegun carriers for their fight against Christian militiamen.

  Still in the transportation business he tried ferrying obsolete Norwegian fishing trawlers from Stavanger to Avon-mouth, determined to make a profit eventually. But faulty navigation and the Dogger Bank on one occasion and a freak ice flow off the Orkneys on another, effectively scuttled trawlers, investment and profit motive.

  It was while he was recovering from hyperthermia on the Orkney island of Hoy that Pilger married. He could never remember whether he had been in love, could not be certain he would have recognized it anyway, but he was fond of her. Her name was Emily, the fifth daughter of a crofter, a widower who fished mackerel and wove traditional white sweaters from the wool of dead sheep he sometimes found drowned on the beaches. Emily was tall, blonde and gentle and fitted perfectly the story promoted by her crofter father that his ancestors, Norwegian noblemen, had sailed from the Norwegian coast on a raft two hundred years before, forced into exile by a localized revolution.

  Unfortunately Emily’s beauty hid a distorted pelvis and when Pilger’s only child was born nine months and two days after their first night together, she didn’t survive to see it. Pilger, saddened by the death but accepting as he always did the obscure judgements of fate, left his baby daughter, whom he named Elizabeth after the Queen of England, with the crofter’s family for safe-keeping and upbringing and departed the pleasant and comfortable life for new adventures with renewed ambition.

  While he was commis-waiting in the Savoy Hotel he saw an advertisement in The Soldier of Fortune, a magazine written by and for war freaks, packed full of information on muzzle velocities, calibres, kill ratios and essentials like the art of garotting, simply explained in picture form by tattooed ex-Vietnam veterans. The advertisement, which had appea
red opposite an article on limpet mines, simply read: ‘Wanted: Ex-British Servicemen for Cattle Protection’.

  The box number was in London but the employment, as he later found out, was in Rhodesia. An immensely wealthy cattle rancher, also founder of Mr Smith’s then ruling Rhodesian Front party, was losing his livestock at an alarming rate to nationalist guerrillas who were fighting the war and to local Shona tribesmen, who were starving because of it.

  Pilger’s job was to patrol approximately fifty square miles of the ranch during the hours of night-time curfew, carrying grenades, an Armalite automatic rifle and American C rations, in the hope he could prevent any more of the rancher’s cows being stolen and eaten. He had been told by the security leader on the ranch, a Frenchman, as round as he was tall, who breathed garlic and spoke in the exaggerated rasping whisper of a chronic laryngitis sufferer, that he would be paid by results. That is, a thousand pounds, or equivalent in any foreign currency, for every rustler he shot dead, plus a bonus of another thousand pounds paid by the Rhodesian government for helping to reduce enemy numbers. The Frenchman pointed out that proof of the kill did not entail presentation of the body. The left ear was enough he said, but only the left; previous ‘sentries’ had cut off and presented both ears claiming two kills for one.

  But being a bounty-hunter gradually depressed Pilger. It became so bad that after months going about his lonely silent treks through the Rhodesian bush, he could not pass a local tribesman without seeing him clad in one-pound notes. Once he had passed six blacks on their way to work as the dawn curfew ended, but even as he saw them they dissolved as people and reappeared in his mind’s eye as six left ears pinned to life-sized wads of Sterling currency representing twelve thousand pounds.

  Pilger’s Rhodesian career ended abruptly the morning he and the cattle rancher were out hunting a rogue wild buffalo who had been goring heifers. Turning suddenly at a movement behind him and firing on the turn, he shot the rancher’s champion pedigree Hereford dead centre of its pretty fringed forelock.

  However, as chance would have it, and chance for a long time now had played a central role in his life, Pilger read that the British Broadcasting Corporation was recruiting assistant producers for their expanding natural history unit in Bristol. The salary offered seemed very generous considering the work involved, so by the time he had returned to London he had very expertly re-structured and relabelled his career to suit the BBC’s Selection Board.

  Resurrecting as best he could from memory the accent and manner of his public school days, he told them respectfully and with some charm that he had always been fascinated by natural history. This fascination with wild life, he said, had begun in Corsica, and had become a passion in the Trucial States, Equatorial Guinea, the Holy Land, including the Lebanon and many countries east to Nepal. He had just completed an extensive tour of the southern areas of Rhodesia, on foot, as part of an international team which was trying to prevent the decimation of grazing milk and beef stock. A programme, he assured them, of combined private and government sponsorship.

  Not surprisingly the Board were impressed and so much so that they waived the upper age limit in order to employ him. Had all or any one of them bothered to keep track of his progress within the Corporation, they would have been surprised and disappointed because the sum total of his two years’ work in Bristol were four fifteen-minute films and only two of them ever made the network; one on tuberculosis in badgers, another on the mating habits of newts which, it was rumoured privately, was a straight lift from the Reader’s Digest anyway.

  He was approaching middle age and no longer ambitious, at least not a man with any single ambition which he thought probably amounted to much the same thing. Elizabeth had joined him from the Orkneys and was working her way through art college in graphic design, and his single task now, as he saw it, was to provide for her. She was his only interest - her and his books on yachting and butterflies, which had suddenly and unaccountably become little passions with him.

  Although he would suffer occasional guilt at doing so little in BBC terms for what seemed in return so much, he reconciled this with the knowledge that if his masters in London felt they were not getting a reasonable return on money spent, they had only to say. And on a day in March they did exactly that. More than that. To his dismay, they fired him.

  So abrupt was the termination of his contract and so flippant the reasons given, that he was reminded of a play he’d seen once called The Killing of Sister George about a BBC actress playing the principal part in a soap-box serial who was peremptorily fired in much the same way as himself.

  Within the next six months, Adam Pilger showed that capacity for sudden decision-making that had always been his trademark. He sold his semi in Bristol, recouped all he could in income tax rebates, surrendered his three endowment policies, cashed his BBC pension and prepared for emigration.

  Looking back now, he could not remember the reasons for the decision to come to Union. He could not recall ever having heard of it before, certainly it had never featured in any of his four natural history productions. But it was, after all, only one of many decisions he had to make then, and eventually he had arrived in Union, seeking a temporary residence permit with £7,500 in Barclays Traveller’s Cheques, Bristow’s Directory of Yachts, his books on butterflies and his daughter Elizabeth.

  And it was Elizabeth, on a promise to return to her studies once her father had settled down, that enabled Adam Pilger to do exactly that so quickly. It was Elizabeth, nineteen years old on the day of their arrival, with her long legs, her long blonde hair, her blue-green eyes the colour of Union’s coral, her fine, strong body, it was all these qualities and more that opened the doors to Union’s Society, doors that would normally have remained locked for some considerable time despite the knocking of strangers. Especially British strangers. On Union, Trafalgar was celebrated annually as a French victory.

  So the mountain of problems that Adam Pilger had expected in starting his new life in a new land among foreigners became quickly a molehill. Because the Unionese with their French pedigree, displayed that quality the French have long been famous for; noisy advocates of beauty.

  And Elizabeth Clare Pilger by anyone’s standard, Gallic, Saxon, Celtic or Latin, was an extraordinarily beautiful girl.

  By lunchtime, Prentice was so drunk he couldn’t move. So he sat quite still on the high barstool and stared wide-eyed at the day barman, a young mulatto recently introduced to the trade. He was new also to daytime drunks and, looking at the motionless, unblinking face at the bar, the boy thought the white man was dying. Or already dead.

  So leaving his post and many thousand of francs’ worth of liquor unguarded, he ran upstairs to the manageress who was trying to unblock the bidet in Doubleday’s room. A woman in her mid-fifties, she was well acquainted with men and men’s habits so she kicked the young barman in the knees and threatened to eat his nose, which thoroughly confused him. She then screamed at him to ignore the fat white man unless he fell off his stool and bled.

  Which was exactly how Faraday found him. The apprentice barman, suddenly more terrified of the manageress than the sprawling, bleeding hulk on the floor, had fled, kicking off his hotel-supplied plimsolls and white coat on the way out.

  Faraday, having watched the yacht safely berth, had rushed back to the hotel to warn Prentice of the President’s return, under the impression that Prentice would cancel the story he’d filed once he had heard the good news. Which was some measure of his naivety.

  ‘Cancel? Not bloody likely.’ Prentice, responding to an ice pack on his forehead was sitting up on the floor, holding the ice to his head with one hand and dabbing Faraday’s handkerchief at his left ear with the other, catching the dribble of blood from the cut.

  ‘But there’s no mystery any more,’ said Faraday. ‘It’s just as Protheroe said. The President went off fishing with his children.’

  He began to col
lect cushions from the bar seats and pile them each side of Prentice, wedging them into position to prop him up.

  ‘The President caught some marlin,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t care if he caught a bleedin’ cold,’ said Prentice. ‘I’ve filed and it stands. You’ll learn one day, my lad, never to let the facts get in the way of a good story.’

  He looked at the handkerchief, winced at the sight of his blood and held it back again to his ear.

  ‘If the bugger’s come back,’ he said, ‘then I’ll do a decent follow-up tomorrow. Christ, I’m dying.’

  Thirty cushions now supported Prentice and he seemed secure. He sat in the middle of the bar-room floor, his eyes slowly closed, his mouth slowly opened and he began to snore.

  Which was how Faraday left him.

  5

  As Prentice had warned on the day of their arrival, it was becoming very difficult for the assembled Press Corps to justify their continuing presence on Union. They had run out of ideas for stories and, more to the point, ideas for their expenses.

  The return of President Laurent from his fishing trip was never filed, the Hotel de la Quai was not declared an international zone and the Americans returned to their satellite tracking station, their Toyotas full of tinned frankfurters and Coke, in anything but a siege mentality.

  The Soviet fleet was not about to anchor in Union’s waters and Prentice and Protheroe seemed to have forgotten the mounting tension on the ‘Island of Frightened Silence’. And as their respective Foreign Editors never came back to them with a reminder, so apparently had they.

  The story had turned out to be, in the journalist’s vernacular, a ‘No-No’.

  As New York Times reporter Kaufmann wrote: ‘This nation of tiny lovely islands, three hundred miles off the African coast, whose major resource is romance, experienced a coup the other day. But as political convulsions go, it was relatively mild. Less of a coup than a hiccough.’