by Glen Duncan
They were on to second drinks when someone knocked. Chick (servants strategically dismissed for the evening) shot his eyebrows up as he got with ticking kneecaps to his slippered feet. ‘That’s our chap.’
Ross and Eugene waited, suddenly nervous, staring at each other. Eugene hurriedly lit a Pall Mall. They heard Chick’s hullo hullo hullo come in come in come in and sat up straighter in their chairs. They listened to Chick furnishing the newcomer, whoever he was, with a drink.
‘We’re out here,’ Chick said. ‘Siddown siddown.’ Despite which Eugene stood up to shake hands.
‘Blaardy hell,’ Ross said.
Skinner, a split second behind, hesitated, then barked a laugh and offered Ross his hand. Eugene, who hadn’t recognized him, was left with his hand in mid-air.
‘Eh?’ Chick said.
Ross, still seated, held on to the handshake as in a mild trance.
‘We know each other,’ Skinner said. ‘My God. I told you. Destiny.’
‘From the train, men,’ Ross had to remind Eugene. ‘From the massacre.’
Eugene, slow-blinking his way into delighted awe, said, eventually, ‘Holy shit on a stick. This is a sign, what? Absolutely a bleddy omen.’
‘I told you there was a higher power at work,’ Skinner said.
Ross couldn’t get past both the immediacy of recognition and simultaneously how much the Englishman had changed. He’d lost weight, and been left with the kind of haircut that might be a last resort against lice. The linen suit had been replaced by khaki shorts and a white vest, the burgundy brogues by chappals. In spite of which the fiercely alert contemporariness remained. He looked, if anything, wider awake. ‘Didn’t snuff it, then?’ he asked Ross, taking the cane chair Chick drew up for him. Ross couldn’t stop looking at the haircut. Skinner saw, ran his hand over it. ‘Don’t you like it?’ he said, laughing. ‘Butchered by a chap in Nagpur last week. I was wearing a hat until someone pinched it literally off my head this afternoon.’
If the enterprise had been lacking momentum this synchronicity provided it. They demolished Chick’s scotch and moved on to rum. Eugene slumped in his chair, visibly queasily drunk.
‘So this is the business,’ Ross said, when Chick had gone inside to urinate.
‘This is an aspect of the business,’ Skinner said. Then after a pause: ‘And presumably, since you’re here, one you’re familiar with.’
Two each, yes? He hadn’t forgotten. ‘Easy come, easy go,’ Ross said. ‘What have you been up to?’
Skinner smiled and spread his hands, radiated the familiar casual capableness; the invitation to mutual transparency was, as before, irresistible, and Ross filled with sly approval of the other man’s survival. ‘Going hither and thither about the land,’ Skinner said. ‘You know, in the spirit of my forefathers. Making money. Actually, I think my time’s probably up here. Too much homegrown competition. King’s English doesn’t carry quite the weight it did. Queen’s English, I should say. Can’t be easy for you, either. “Anglos out” and all that?’ The slogan had appeared a week ago, raggedly hand-painted in big white letters on the wall of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament.
‘I’m going anyway,’ Ross said. ‘But I’ll do it in my own time.’
‘Still fighting?’
‘Still fighting.’
‘This bugger,’ Eugene said, levering himself upright in wincing stages, fishing out another Pall Mall, wagging his finger, ‘is going all the way. You watch. Helsinki. Those Eskimo buggers are in for a bleddy shock.’
‘It’s the Americans you’ve got to worry about,’ Skinner said, ‘the Negroes especially. I saw one down in Madras last year, exhibition bout. Fought that fellow Ginger Robbins. Gave him rather a lesson, I’m afraid.’
‘I know Ginger Robbins,’ Ross said. ‘I fought him in school.’
‘And?’
‘Knocked him out in the third.’
Eugene was ambushed mid-giggle by a belch which knotted in his gullet and forced him to scurry to his feet. He let it out–beey-ouwr–then ran his hand from the top of his face to the bottom. He looked close to vomiting.
‘Walk it off, for God’s sake, will you?’ Ross said. Eugene closed his eyes, breathed deeply through his nose, then took half a dozen tottering steps into Chick’s garden.
‘Look, it’s up to you,’ Skinner said to Ross. ‘But it’s pretty low risk. I’ve worked with a couple of these chaps before.’
‘Goondas?’
‘Not my chaps. There’ll be one or two hired hands, I daresay, but on the whole it’s a cakewalk. Still, it’s your train. Absolutely understand if you want to pass.’
Nothing had changed between them, Ross saw. The shared sense of themselves as savvy adventurers. Life was the struggle to get away with getting what you wanted. Jack thieved under the dozing giant’s nose. For Ross the giant was still God, who might at any moment wake up and mightily swipe. Who was it for the Englishman? He seemed Godless, but in the occasional wry edges of his smile to acknowledge that someone was watching, that at any moment Authority might reach down and pin him and make him pay. He conceded this, Ross thought, but with levity; and underneath the levity a kind of glorious Satanic contempt.
‘Okay,’ Chick said coming through the door with a tray of Indian sweets. ‘Everything settled?’
The plan was to halt the train (destination Badnera) between Bhusawal and the first stop, Varangaon. Six men would be waiting with a truck. They’d carefully break the offside seal on the silk wagon, lessen the shipment by forty bales, then reseal the wagon and the train would be on its way. Eugene reckoned fourteen minutes. ‘What do you mean “reseal”?’ Ross had asked him. ‘You can’t reseal a wagon like that.’ The seal’s integrity was established by an unbroken circular pin which fitted through a lead disc. ‘We’ve been through this, for Christ’s sake,’ Eugene said–which was true. Ross had made small noises of scepticism with Skinner but reserved the full weight for Eugene. ‘If you cut it carefully,’ Eugene said, ‘you can thread it back through when you’re finished. It looks sealed.’ ‘But it isn’t,’ Ross said. ‘No, it isn’t,’ Eugene for the umpteenth time agreed. ‘But it’s dark, and it’s on the off side, ten feet above the watchman’s head. It’ll look sealed to him. He’s not going to be looking that closely. He’d have to get a bleddy ladder and climb up to inspect it properly, and even then he might be fooled unless he grabs hold of the bleddy thing and tugs it. Trust me, men, I’m telling you.’
Ross remained unconvinced, spent the week in a state of agitation. The more he thought about it the less he liked it. It was a pleasure and a relief to him, therefore, when on the night of the operation–gimcrack or not–they hit a snag at the outset.
‘Fuck it,’ Eugene said, after Ross had pointed out the problem.
‘What’s the trouble?’ the station master asked, when they called him. He was an Englishman, Harry Granger, with a militant ruddy face and black-lashed turquoise eyes. With his looks (under the cap a bristling white short-back-and-sides) he ought to have done everything with martial precision; in fact, he was a highly bribable bodger who slacked on every aspect of the job.
‘Look at the gauge,’ Ross said. ‘We’re six units short on vacuum pressure.’
Harry studied the gauge, redundantly rapped it with his index fingernail, exhaled. God or the invisible vague conspiracy did this sort of thing to him, personally. It was an obscene injustice if he had to get up from his desk. ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said, sleepily. ‘Well, if it’s a leak it’s a leak.’
While the engineer tried to track it down Ross went up to the engine. ‘Well, that’s that,’ he said to Eugene. Now that the job looked scuppered, now that he’d got what he’d told himself he wanted, the lost five hundred hurt him under the ribs.
‘We’ll be all right,’ Eugene said. ‘They’ll wait. What else have they got to do?’
‘This is a bad sign,’ Ross said. ‘You want omens? This is an omen.’
‘Don’t be such a sissy, men.’
<
br /> The engineer spent an hour treating what might be leaks, eventually got the pressure up.
‘This is ridiculous,’ Ross said to Eugene.
‘Relax, will you?’
‘The rear hosepipe’s only tied, you know.’
‘Yeah, well, it won’t be the first time. Come on let’s get her out of here.’
‘They won’t be there,’ Ross said. ‘We’re an hour behind time.’
‘They’ll be there,’ Eugene said. ‘They want the stuff.’
They were there, and as agreed flashed the truck headlights. Ross gave return flashes with his torch. The silk wagon was halfway down the load, too far to pick out any details, though Ross told himself he could feel it like a sentient presence. He listened. A wagon door on the off side opened with a soft roar. He looked at his watch. They were fifteen minutes out of Bhusawal. Starlight but no moon. Darkness was compelled to serve crime. The signal for All Clear was three flashes from the headlights. Eugene stayed put on the engine and he stayed put in the brake. That way no one saw anyone face to face.
Suddenly Ross saw figures on the near side of the train. There were muffled sounds, then the unmufflable sound of another wagon door sliding open.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ he hissed, having run up, though he could see what they were doing: a stack of some half-dozen silk bales lay palely glimmering on the ground. The six men, gleaming wiry Indians, four in dhotis only, two in kurta pyjamas, were working in relay pairs at an incredible speed.
‘You’re not supposed to see us,’ the one nearest him said–then leaped up into the wagon like a frog.
‘You’ve broken the bleddy seal on this side, too,’ Ross said. The track was quiet and alive, the stars like a slowly passing brilliant swarm. A separate part of Ross’s consciousness was busy with the way the land’s sensuousness ambushed you when you stopped, whatever else was going on. It was as if this spot, at all other times passed through, must let everything it had–two or three thorn bushes, a sprinkling of open-faced feminine white flowers, a solitary dead tree and a scatter of rusting oil drums–gush out while there was someone to receive it, since it might be a hundred years before anyone stopped precisely here again. ‘Why did you do this?’ Ross said. ‘This seal’s going to be—’
‘We couldn’t get them out of the other side,’ one in pyjamas gasped, dropping from the wagon to the ground. ‘They’re stacked too tight.’
‘What?’
‘Go and see. Go and see for yourself.’
Ross went between the couplings. The off-side door was open and many bales revealed, but he could see why they hadn’t been able to shift them. The wagon had been loaded from the opposite side; here you faced a solid wall of bales, no way of dislodging them. Why, Ross wondered, had no one considered this? He looked at his watch. They’d been stationary for seven minutes. He clambered back through the couplings. There were now at least a dozen long rolls of silk on the ground. The shimmer of the stuff was arresting. He reached down and ran his hand along the nearest. Panic was like that, kept offering you openings into dreamily pretending nothing was happening. You thought, Look at me: here I am in the middle of a dangerous situation and I’m fondling a roll of golden silk. He shook himself out of it. ‘In exactly eight minutes I’m signalling my driver to start,’ he said. The six men ignored him. They were sheened with sweat. The dignity of the body at work was unimpeachable, no matter the job.
The eight minutes passed. Twenty bales lay on the ground. How big was the truck? ‘Come on,’ Ross said. ‘That’s it. Let’s go.’
‘We’ve got orders for forty,’ one of the men said. Since it was the first utterance not whispered, hissed or gasped, it came out dark and wooden, not quite a threat. Ross, armpits aflame, began making power calculations. They weren’t armed, but there were six of them. Even with Eugene (who was no fighter) the odds were impossible. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’m going round to seal the offside door. You get as many out as you can. But when I come back I’m sealing this fucking door without argument or this whole thing is going in my report as an armed robbery. I’ve seen all your bleddy faces so don’t get smart.’ Empty. They knew, recognized an offer of compromise. You get as many out as you can. It was still teamwork. He hadn’t delivered that ‘fucking’ convincingly, either. It wasn’t one of his words.
‘We’ll take thirty,’ the not-whispering one said, not pausing in the unloading, just as Ross turned his back to go yet again between the wagons. Something else in the tone: you’re not a protected species any more. An exciting vulnerability tingled in his fingertips and scalp. There was an endorsement of the idea even in the land’s sensuous assault. We pull out, you buggers are going to be up shit creek wi’out a paddle. I’m not going to be here by 1960, he’d told Hector. Since recovering from pneumonia he’d trained lightly but consistently; his body had given him a shock, that it could be laid low like that. Now the training was a dialogue with his body he must stay engaged in. In the dark Kate, like a child, felt his daily hardening muscles. She liked it, she said. That she said such things disinterestedly, not for his pleasure, made his pride feel like a virtue. We’ll take thirty. Statement not request. Threat would be next. The certainty of this made him glad of the strength of his body, that if it came to fighting–if life ever came to fighting–there would never be the regret even in defeat that he hadn’t made himself as strong as he could be. At the same time he knew a fight here wouldn’t be a fight; it would be him getting uglily beaten up, possibly killed. He couldn’t afford it. Boxing season only a month away, the trials, the Olympics, the plan.
He did what he could with the off-side seal. Hastily splashed with an unsuspicious torch it would probably pass. It wasn’t the off side he was worried about.
‘Okay, come on, that’s it.’
They had close enough to thirty bales out. Two of the men had been dispatched for the truck, which came gargling up now with headlights off.
‘Two more,’ the leader said. Ross pushed past him, grabbed the wagon door and hauled it shut. It was a fine calculation to make, whether turning your back on a man disarmed or empowered him. In the push past he’d smelled curryish sweat, smoker’s breath, essential cowardice. No, he hadn’t smelled that. That was just what you told yourself to force yourself through your own fear. Ross worked on the seal. He could hear them loading the truck behind him, but could sense–through the back of his head, back, buttocks, thighs, calves, heels–that the leader was standing and watching him, weighing up making trouble.
‘What the Christing hell is going on down there?’ Eugene’s voice called through the darkness.
‘Almost done,’ Ross called back. It was a relief to shout in full voice.
‘We’ve got to go,’ Eugene bellowed. ‘Now.’
‘Wait for my bleddy signal,’ Ross said. This was good, a conversation which edged the leader out of the frame. He could feel the man sullenly accepting that twenty-eight bales was it. ‘Almost there,’ he shouted, to keep it going. ‘Okay!’ The seal wasn’t convincing but it was as good as it was going to get. They’d just have to trust to luck. He jumped down from the wagon and crossed a second time through the man’s aura. There was a surge–he tightened, felt the frenzy of adrenalin in his knees and hands and scalp–then final acceptance. The leader gave a single quiet laugh and turned away.
The watchman at Malkapur wasn’t unknown to Ross but he wasn’t familiar enough to bribe. He did a cursory pass of the off side without comment, came round to the near side, stopped at the brake to offer a cigarette. The blueish-white platform lights demystified the train.
‘No, thanks, I don’t smoke.’
‘Everything okay, sahib?’ He was a young Indian with a happy beady-eyed and thin-moustached face. His shirt collar was too big for him. Ross knew the type: smiled at his uniform when he hung it up on the wardrobe door.
‘Will be if we don’t lose the rear hose again. Twenty minutes late since Varangaon.’ This was the story Ross had settled on. The rear hosepipe
, only tied on to the vacuum seal at Bhusawal in the first place, had come uncoupled and had to be retied. He’d had a raft of other bogus reasons for stopping but the pressure leak had a witness, Harry Granger, station master no less. That was sheer luck, but then so was the wagon being loaded from the near rather than the off side. God made it easy for you with His left hand, difficult with His right.
The young watchman walked back down the platform, slowly, flicking his torch up at the seals. Ross leaned out of the brake. He was starving, incapable of eating. The tiffin box held samosas, a chicken curry, three parathas, biscuits, half a bar of Tarzan chocolate and a flask of coffee. He wouldn’t touch any of it until they’d dropped off the load at Badnera and were on their way back to Bhusawal. He wished he did smoke, something you could do to feed your nerves and pass the time. Keep going, keep going, keep going…
Something fell from the watchman’s pocket. Ross squinted. Cigarettes, the pack of Gold Flake. The watchman stopped, bent to pick them up. Noticed something. The torch flicked low, held its beam steady, then skipped up to the wagon’s seal.
‘Sahib?’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Seal on this wagon’s broken.’
Ross got down from the brake and walked up to where the watchman had stopped. A triangle of pink silk was sticking out from beneath the door.
‘What happened, sahib?’
‘Damned if I know,’ Ross said. ‘They were sealed at Bhusawal. I signed for them. Let’s get it resealed as quick as you can.’
‘Very good, sahib.’
Ross jogged up to Eugene on the engine and broke the news. Eugene shook his head, kicked a panel, looked for a moment as if he might break down in tears. ‘Nothing,’ he said quietly. ‘Nothing ever goes smooth for me.’
‘You?’ Ross said. ‘It’s me they’re going to suspect. I’m the one who stopped the bleddy train. I’m the one those goondas are going to pick out if they get caught. Easy money. Bleddy hell.’
