Jack Higgins
The Last Place God Made

Dedication

And this one is for my sister-in-law,

Babs Hewitt, who is absolutely certain

it’s about time…

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The Last Place God Made was first published in the UK by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd in 1971 and later by Signet in 1997. This amazing novel has been out of print for some years, and in 2009, it seemed to the author and his publishers that it was a pity to leave such a good story languishing on his shelves. So we are delighted to be able to bring back The Last Place God Made for the pleasure of the vast majority of us who never had a chance to read the earlier editions.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Publisher’s Note

Foreword

1 Ceiling Zero

2 Maria of the Angels

3 The Immelmann Turn

4 Landro

5 The Killing Ground

6 The Scarlet Flower

7 Sister of Pity

8 The Tree of Life

9 Drumbeat

10 Just One of those Things

11 Showdown

12 Hell on Earth

13 Balsero

14 Up the River of Death

15 The Last Show

16 Downriver

About the Author

Other Books by Jack Higgins

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

Small planes feature in many of my books. I can’t fly them myself, but I travel in them a great deal. My wife, Denise, is a qualified pilot, and she provides any expertise I need about flying. The Last Place God Made concerns a First World War Bristol fighter being used in the Amazon in 1939 to fly mail.

When I was a young man in Leeds, a close friend’s father used to tell us of his experiences flying a Bristol in Russia in 1919. He was awarded the DFC while serving with an RAF squadron in Archangel, helping the white Russians against what were then known as the Reds. His exciting stories sparked my interest in flying.

1
Ceiling Zero

When the port wing began to flap I knew I was in trouble, not that I hadn’t been for some little time. Oil pressure mainly plus a disturbing miss in the beat of the old Pratt and Whitney Wasp engine that put me uncomfortably in mind of the rattle in a dying man’s throat.

The Vega had been good enough in its day. Typical of that sudden rush of small high-winged, single-engined airliners that appeared in the mid-1920s. Built to carry mail and half a dozen passengers at a hundred or so miles an hour.

The one I was trying to keep in the air at that precise moment in time had been built in 1927 which made it eleven years old. Eleven years of flying mail in every kind of weather. Of inadequate servicing. Of over use.

She’d been put together again after no fewer than three crash landings and that was only what was officially entered in the log. God alone knows what had been missed out.

Kansas, Mexico, Panama, Peru, sinking a little lower with each move, finding it that much more difficult to turn in her best performance, like a good horse being worked to death. Now, she was breaking up around me in the air and there wasn’t much I could do about it.

From Iquitos in Peru, the Amazon river twists like a brown snake through two thousand miles of some of the worst jungle in the world, its final destination Belem on the Atlantic coast of Brazil with Manaus at the junction with the Rio Negro, the halfway point and my present destination.

For most of the way, I’d followed the river which at least made for easy navigation, alone with three sacks of mail and a couple of crates of some kind of mining machinery. Six long, hard hours to Tefé and I managed to raise three police posts on the way on my radio although things were quiet as the grave at Tefé itself.

From there, the river drifted away in a great, wide loop and to have followed it would have made the run to Manaus another four hundred miles and the Vega just didn’t have that kind of fuel in reserve.

From Tefé, then, I struck out due east across virgin jungle, aiming for the Rio Negro a hundred and fifty miles farther on where a turn downstream would bring me to Manaus.

It had been a crazy venture from the first, a flight that to my knowledge no one had accomplished at that time and yet at twenty-three, with the sap rising, a man tends to think himself capable of most things and Belem was, after all, two thousand miles closer to England than the point from which I’d started and a passage home at the end of it.

Yet I see now, looking back on it all after so many years, how much in the whole affair was the product of chance, that element quite beyond calculation in a man’s affairs.

To start with, my bold plunge across such a wide stretch of virgin jungle was not quite as insane as it might appear. True, any attempt at dead reckoning was ruled out by the simple fact that my drift indicator was not working and the magnetic compass was wholly unreliable, but the Rio Negro did lie a hundred and fifty miles due east of Tefé, that was fact, and I had the sun to guide me in a sky so crystal clear that the horizon seemed to stretch to infinity.

Falling oil pressure was the first of my woes although I didn’t worry too much about that to start with for the Oil Pressure Gauge, like most of the instruments, frequently didn’t work at all and was at best, less than reliable.

And then, unbelievably, the horizon broke into a series of jagged peaks almost before my eyes, something else about which I couldn’t really complain for on the map, that particular section was merely a blank space.

Not that they were the Andes exactly, but high enough, considering the Vega’s general condition, although the altimeter packed in at four thousand feet, so everything after that was guesswork.

The sensible way of doing things would have been to stay far enough from them to be out of harm’s way and then to gain the correct height to cross the range by flying round and round in upward spirals for as long as may be. But I didn’t have time enough for that, by which I mean fuel and simply eased back the stick and went in on the run.

I don’t suppose there was more than four or five hundred feet in it as I started across the first great shoulder that lifted in a hog’s back out of the dark green of the rain forest. Beyond, I faced a scattering of jagged peaks and not too much time for decisions.

I took a chance, aimed for the gap between the two largest and flew on over a landscape so barren that it might have been the moon. I dropped sickeningly in an air pocket, the Vega protesting with every fibre of its being and I eased back the stick again as the ground rose to meet me.

For a while it began to look as if I’d made a bad mistake for the pass through which I was flying narrowed considerably so that at one point, there seemed every chance of the wing-tips brushing the rock face. And then, quite suddenly, I lifted over a great, fissured ridge with no more than a hundred feet to spare and found myself flying across an enormous valley, mist rising to engulf me like steam from a boiling pot.

Suddenly, it was a lot colder and rain drifted across the windshield in a fine spray and then the horizon of things crackled with electricity as rain swept in from the east in a great cloud to engulf me.

Violent tropical storms of that type were one of the daily hazards of flying in the area. Frequent and usually short-lived, they could wreak an incredible amount of damage and the particular danger was the lightning associated with them. It was usually best to climb over them, but the Vega was already as high as she was going to go considering the state she was in so I really had no other choice than to hang on and hope for the best.

I didn’t think of dying, I was too involved in keeping the plane in the air to have time for anything else. The Vega was made of wood. Cantilevered wings and streamlined wooden skin fuselage, manufactured in two halves and glued together like a child’s toy and now, the toy was tearing itself to pieces.

Outside, it was almost completely dark and water cascaded in through every strained seam in the fuselage as we rocked in the turbulence. Rain streamed from the wings, lightning flickering at their tips and pieces of fuselage started to flake away.

I felt a kind of exultation more than anything else at the sheer involvement of trying to control that dying plane and actually laughed out loud at one point when a section of the roof went and water cascaded in over my head.

I came out into bright sunlight of the late afternoon and saw the river on the horizon immediately. It had to be the Negro and I pushed the Vega towards it, ignoring the stench of burning oil, the rattling of the wings.

Pieces were breaking away from the fuselage constantly now and the Vega was losing height steadily. God alone knows what was keeping the engine going. It was really quite extraordinary. Any minute now, and the damn thing might pack up altogether and a crash landing in that impenetrable rain forest below was not something I could reasonably hope to survive.

A voice crackled in my earphone. ‘Heh, Vega, your wings are flapping so much I thought you were a bird. What’s keeping you up?’

He came up from nowhere and levelled out off my port wing, a Hayley monoplane in scarlet and silver trim, no more than four or five years old from the look of it. The voice was American and with a distinctive harshness to it that gave it its own flavour in spite of the static that was trying to drown it.

‘Who are you?’

‘Neil Mallory,’ I said. ‘Iquitos for Belem by way of Manaus.’

‘Jesus.’ He laughed harshly. ‘I thought it was Lindberg they called the flying fool. Manaus is just on a hundred miles downriver from here. Can you stay afloat that long?’

Another hour at least. I checked the fuel gauge and air-speed indicator and faced the inevitable. ‘Not a chance. Speed’s falling all the time and my tank’s nearly dry.’

‘No use jumping for it in this kind of country,’ he said. ‘You’d never be seen again. Can you hold her together for another ten minutes?’

‘I can try.’

‘There’s a patch of campo ten or fifteen miles downstream. Give you a chance to land that thing if you’re good enough.’

I didn’t reply because the fuselage actually started to tear away in a great strip from the port wing and the wing, as if in pain, moved up and down more frantically than ever.

I was about a thousand feet up as we reached the Negro and turned downstream, drifting gradually and inevitably towards the ground like a falling leaf. There was sweat on my face in spite of the wind rushing in through the holes in the fuselage and my hands were cramped tight on the stick for it was taking all my strength to hold her.

‘Easy, kid, easy.’ That strange, harsh voice crackled through the static. ‘Not long now. A mile downstream on your left. I’d tell you to start losing height only you’re falling like a stone as it is.’

‘I love you too,’ I said and clamped my teeth hard together and held on as the Vega lurched violently to starboard.

The campo blossomed in the jungle a quarter of a mile in front of me, a couple of hundred yards of grassland beside the river. The wind seemed to be in the right direction although in the state the Vega was in, there wasn’t much I could have done about it if it hadn’t been. I hardly needed to throttle back to reduce airspeed for my approach – the engine had almost stopped anyway – but I got the tail trimmer adjusted and dropped the flaps as I floated in across the tree-tops.

It took all my sterngth to hold her, stamping on the rudder to pull her back in line as she veered to starboard. It almost worked. I plunged down, with a final burst of power to level out for my landing and the engine chose that precise moment to die on me.

It was like running slap into an invisible wall. The Vega seemed to hang there in the air a hundred feet above the ground for a moment, then swooped.

I left the undercarriage in the branches of the trees at the west end of the campo. In fact I think, in the final analysis, that was what saved me for the braking effect on the plane as she barged through the top of the trees was considerable. She simply flopped down on her belly on the campo and ploughed forward through the six-foot-high grass, leaving both wings behind her on the way and came to a dead halt perhaps twenty yards from the bank of the river.

I unstrapped my seat belt, kicked open the door, threw out the mail bags and followed them through, just in case. But there was no need and the fact that she hadn’t gone up like a torch on impact wasn’t luck. It was simply that there wasn’t anything left in the tanks to burn.

I sat down very carefully on one of the mail sacks. My hands were trembling slightly – not much, but enough – and my heart was pounding like a trip-hammer. The Hayley swooped low overhead. I waved without looking up, then unzipped my flying jacket and found a tin of Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, last of a carton I’d bought on the black market in Lima the previous month. I don’t think anything in life to that moment had ever tasted as good.

After a while, I stood up and turned in time to see the Hayley bank and drop in over the trees on the far side of the campo. He made it look easy and it was far from that, for the wreckage of the Vega and the position where its wings had come to rest in its wake left him very little margin for error. There couldn’t have been more than a dozen yards between the tip of his port wing and the edge of the trees.

I sat down on one of the mail sacks again, mainly because my legs suddenly felt very weak and lit another Sobranie. I could hear him ploughing towards me through the long grass, and once he called my name. God knows why I didn’t answer. Some kind of shock. I suppose. I simply sat there, the cigarette slack between my lips and stared beyond the wreck of the Vega to the river, taking in every sight and sound in minute detail as if to prove I was alive.

‘By God, you can fly, boy. I’ll say that for you.’

He emerged from the grass and stood looking at me, hands on hips in what I was to learn was an inimitable gesture. He was physically very big indeed and wore a leather top-coat, breeches, knee-length boots, a leather helmet, goggles pushed up high on the forehead and there was a .45 Colt automatic in a holster on his right thigh.

I put out my hand and when I spoke, the voice seemed to belong to someone else. ‘Mallory – Neil Mallory.’

‘You already told me that – remember?’ He grinned. ‘My name’s Hannah – Sam Hannah. Anything worth salvaging in there besides the mail?’

As I discovered later, he was forty-five years of age at that time, but he could have been older or younger if judged on appearance alone for he had one of those curiously ageless faces, tanned to almost the same colour as his leather coat.

He had the rather hard, self-possessed, competent look of a man who had been places and done things, survived against odds on occasions and yet, even from the first, there seemed a flaw in him. He made too perfect a picture standing there in his flying kit, gun on hip, like some R.F.C. pilot waiting to take off on a dawn patrol across the trenches, yet more like a man playing the part than the actuality. And the eyes were wrong – a sort of pale, washed blue that never gave anything away.

I told him about the mining machinery and he climbed inside the Vega to look for himself. He reappeared after a while holding a canvas grip.

‘This yours?’ I nodded and he threw it down. ‘Those crates are out of the question. Too heavy for the Hayley anyway. Anything else you want?’

I shook my head and then remembered. ‘Oh yes, there’s a revolver in the map compartment.’

He found it with no difficulty and pushed it across, together with a box of cartridges, a Webley .38 which I shoved away in one of the pockets of my flying jacket.

‘Then if you’re ready, we’ll get out of here.’ He picked up the three mail sacks with no visible effort. ‘The Indians in these parts are Jicaros. There were around five thousand of them till last year when some doctor acting for one of the land companies infected them with smallpox instead of vaccinating them against it. The survivors have developed the unfortunate habit of skinning alive any white man they can lay hands on.’

But such tales had long lost the power to move me for they were commonplace along the Amazon at a time when most settlers or prospectors regarded the Indians as something other than human. Vermin to be ruthlessly stamped out and any means were looked upon as fair.

I stumbled along behind Hannah who kept up a running conversation, cursing freely as great clouds of grasshoppers and insects of various kinds rose in clouds as we disturbed them.

‘What a bloody country. The last place God made. As far as I’m concerned, the Jicaros can have it and welcome.’

‘Then why stay?’ I asked him.

We had reached the Haley by then and he heaved the mail bags inside and turned, a curious glitter in his eyes. ‘Not from choice, boy, I can tell you that.’

He gave me a push up into the cabin. It wasn’t as large as the Vega. Seats for four passengers and a freight compartment behind, but everything was in apple-pie order and not just because she wasn’t all that old. This was a plane that enjoyed regular, loving care. Something I found faintly surprising because it didn’t seem to fit with Hannah.

I strapped myself in beside him and he closed the door. ‘A hundred and eighty this baby does at full stretch. You’ll be wallowing in a hot bath before you know it.’ He grinned. ‘All right, tepid, if I know my Manaus plumbing.’

Suddenly I was very tired. It was marvellous just to sit there, strapped comfortably into my seat and let someone else do the work and as I’ve said, he was good. Really good. There wasn’t going to be more than a few feet in it as far as those trees were concerned at the far end of the campo and yet I hadn’t a qualm as he turned the Hayley into the wind and opened the throttle.

He kept her going straight into that green wall, refusing to sacrifice power for height, waiting until the last possible moment, pulling the stick back into his stomach and lifting us up over the tops of the trees with ten feet to spare.

He laughed out loud and slapped the bulkhead with one hand. ‘You know what’s the most important thing in life, Mallory? Luck – and I’ve got a bucket full of the stuff. I’m going to live to be a hundred and one.’

‘Good luck to you,’ I said.

Strange, but he was like a man with drink taken. Not drunk, but unable to stop talking. For the life of me, I can’t remember what he said, for gradually my eyes closed and his voice dwindled until it was one with the engine itself and then, that too faded and there was only the quiet darkness.

2
Maria of the Angels

I had hoped to be on my way in a matter of hours, certainly no later than the following day for in spite of the fact that Manaus was passing through hard times, there was usually a boat of some description or another leaving for the coast most days.

Things started to go wrong from the beginning. To start with, there was the police in the person of the comandante himself who insisted on giving me a personal examination regarding the crash, noting my every word in his own hand which took up a remarkable amount of time.

After signing my statement I had to wait outside his office while he got Hannah’s version of the affair. They seemed to be old and close friends from the laughter echoing faintly through the closed door and when they finally emerged, Hannah had an arm round the comandante’s shoulder.

‘Ah, Senhor Mallory.’ The comandante nodded graciously. ‘I have spoken to Captain Hannah on this matter and am happy to say that he confirms your story in every detail. You are free to go.’

Which was nice of him. He went back into his office and Hannah said, ‘That’s all right, then.’ He frowned as if concerned and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I’ve got things to do, but you look like the dead walking. Grab a cab downstairs and get the driver to take you to the Palace Hotel. Ask for Senhor Juca. Tell him I sent you. Five or six hours’ sleep and you’ll be fine. I’ll catch up with you this evening. We’ll have something to eat. Hit the high spots together.’

‘In Manaus?’ I said.

‘They still have their fair share of sin if you know where to look.’ He grinned crookedly. ‘I’ll see you later.’

He returned to the comandante’s office, opening the door without knocking and I went downstairs and out through the cracked marble pillars at the entrance.

I didn’t go to the hotel straight away. Instead, I took one of the horse-drawn cabs that waited at the bottom of the steps and gave the driver the address of the local agent of the mining company for whom I’d contracted to deliver the Vega to Belem.

In its day during the great rubber boom at the end of the nineteeth century, Manaus had been the original hell-hole, millionaires walking the streets ten-a-penny, baroque palaces, an opera house to rival Paris itself. No sin too great, no wickedness too evil. Sodom and Gomorrah rolled into one and set down on the banks of the Negro, a thousand miles up the Amazon.

I had never cared much for the place. There was a suggestion of corruption, a kind of general decay. A feeling that the jungle was gradually creeping back in and that none of us had any right to be there.

I felt restless and ill-at-ease, reaction to stress, I suppose, and wanted nothing so much as to be on my way, looking back on this place over the sternrail of a riverboat for the last time.

I found the agent in the office of a substantial warehouse on the waterfront. He was tall, cadaverous, with the haunted eyes of a man who knows he has not got long to live and he coughed repeatedly into a large, soiled handkerchief which was already stained with blood.

He gave thanks to Our Lady for my deliverance to the extent of crossing himself and in the same breath pointed out that under the terms of my contract, I only got paid on safe delivery of the Vega to Belem. Which was exactly what I had expected and I left him in a state of near collapse across his desk doing his level best to bring up what was left of his lungs and went outside.

My cab still waited for me, the driver dozing in the heat of the day, his straw sombrero tilted over his eyes. I walked across to the edge of the wharf to see what was going on in the basin which wasn’t much, but there was a stern-wheeler up at the next wharf loading green bananas.

I found the captain in a canvas chair under an awning on the bridge and he surfaced for as long as it took to tell me he was leaving at nine the following morning for Belem and that the trip would take six days. If I didn’t fancy a hammock on deck with his more impoverished customers, I could have the spare bunk in the mate’s cabin with all found for a hundred cruzeiros. I assured him I would be there on time and he closed his eyes with complete indifference and returned to more important matters.

I had just over a thousand cruzeiros in my wallet, around a hundred and fifty pounds sterling at that time which meant that even allowing for the trip down-river and incidental expenses, I would have ample in hand to buy myself a passage to England from Belem on some cargo boat or other.

I was going home. After two and a half years of the worst that South America could offer, I was on my way and it felt marvellous. Definitely one of life’s great moments and all tiredness left me as I turned and hurried back to the cab.

I had expected the worst of the hotel but the Palace was a pleasant surprise. Certainly it had seen better days, but it had a kind of baroque dignity to it, a faded charm that was very appealing, and Hannah’s name had a magic effect on the Senhor Juca he had mentioned, an old, white-haired man in an alpaca jacket who sat behind the desk reading a newspaper.

He took me upstairs personally and ushered me into a room with its own little ironwork terrace overlooking the river. The whole place was a superb example of late Victoriana, caught for all time like a fly in amber from the brass bed to the heavy, mahogany furniture.

An Indian woman in a black bombazine dress appeared with clean sheets and the old man showed me, with some pride, the bathroom next door of which I could have sole use, although regrettably it would be necessary to ring for hot water. I thanked him for his courtesy, but he waved his hands deprecatingly and assured me, with some eloquence, that nothing was too much trouble for a friend of Captain Hannah’s.

I thought about that as I undressed. Whatever else you could say about him, Hannah obviously enjoyed considerable standing in Manaus which was interesting, considering he was a foreigner.

I needed that bath badly, but suddenly, sitting there on the edge of the bed after getting my boots off, I was overwhelmed with tiredness. I climbed between the sheets and was almost instantly asleep.

I surfaced to the mosquito net billowing above me like a pale, white flower in the breeze from the open window and beyond, a face floated disembodied in the diffused yellow glow of an oil lamp.

Old Juca blinked sad, moist eyes. ‘Captain Hannah was here earlier, senhor. He asked me to wake you at nine o’clock.’

It took its own time in getting through to me. ‘Nine o’clock?’

‘He asks you to meet him, senhor, at The Little Boat. He wishes you to dine with him. I have a cab waiting to take you there, senhor. Everything is arranged.’

‘That’s nice of him,’ I said, but any iron in my voice was obviously lost on him.

‘Your bath is waiting, senhor. Hot water is provided.’

He put the lamp down carefully on the table, the door closed with a gentle sigh behind him, the mosquito net fluttered in the eddy like some great moth, then settled again.

Hannah certainly took a lot for granted. I got up, feeling vaguely irritated at the way things were being managed for me and padded across to the open window. Quite suddenly, my whole mood changed for it was pleasantly cool after the heat of the day, the breeze perfumed with flowers. Lights glowed down there on the river and music echoed faintly, the freedom from the sound of it, pulsating through the night, filling me with a vague, irrational excitement.

When I turned back to the room I made another discovery. My canvas grip had been unpacked and my old linen suit had been washed and pressed and hung neatly from the back of a chair waiting for me. There was really nothing I could do, the pressures were too great, so I gave in gracefully, found a towel and went along the corridor to have my bath.

Although the main rainy season was over, rainfall always tends to be heavy in the upper Amazon basin area and sudden, violent downpours are common, especially at night.

I left the hotel to just such a rush of rain and hurried down the steps to the cab which was waiting for me, escorted by Juca who insisted on holding an ancient black umbrella over my head. The driver had raised the leather hood which kept out most of the rain if not all and drove away at once.

The streets were deserted, washed clean of people by the rain and from the moment we left the hotel until we reached our destination, I don’t think we saw more than half a dozen people, particularly when we moved through the back streets towards the river.

We emerged on the waterfront at a place where there were a considerable number of houseboats of various kinds for a great many people actually lived on the river this way. We finally came to a halt at the end of a long pier.

‘This way, senhor.’

The cabby insisted on placing his old oilskin coat about my shoulders and escorted me to the end of the pier where a lantern hung from a pole above a rack festooned with fishing nets.

An old riverboat was moored out there in the darkness, lights gleaming, laughter and music drifting across the water. He leaned down and lifted a large, wooden trapdoor and the light from the lamp flooded in to reveal a flight of wooden steps. He went down and I followed without hesitation. I had, after all, no reason to expect foul play and in any event, the Webley .38 which I’d had the forethought to slip into my right-hand coat pocket was as good an insurance as any.

A kind of boardwalk stretched out through the darkness towards the riverboat, constructed over a series of canoes and it dipped alarmingly as we moved across.

When we reached the other end the cabby smiled and slapped the hull with the flat of his palm. ‘The Little Boat, senhor. Good appetite in all things but in food and women most of all.’

It was a Brazilian saying and well intended. I reached for my wallet and he raised a hand. ‘It is not necessary, senhor. The good captain has seen to it all.’

Hannah again. I watched him negotiate the swaying catwalk successfully as far as the pier then turned and went up some iron steps which took me to the deck. A giant of a man moved from the shadows beside a lighted doorway, a Negro with a ring in one ear and a heavy, curly beard.

‘Senhor?’ he said.

‘I’m looking for Captain Hannah,’ I told him. ‘He’s expecting me.’

The teeth gleamed in the darkness. Another friend of Hannah’s. This was really beginning to get monotonous. He didn’t say anything, simply opened the door for me and I passed inside.

I suppose it must have been the main saloon in the old days. Now it was crowded with tables, people crammed together like sardines. There was a permanent curtain of smoke that, allied to the subdued lighting, made visibility a problem, but I managed to detect a bar in one corner on the other side of the small, packed dance floor. A five-piece rumba band was banging out a carioca and most of the crowd seemed to be singing along with it.

I saw Hannah in the thick of it on the floor dancing about as close as it was possible to get to a really beautiful girl by any standards. She was of mixed blood, Negro-European variety was my guess and wore a dress of scarlet satin that fitted her like a second skin and made her look like the devil’s own.

He swung her round, saw me and let out a great cry. ‘Heh, Mallory, you made it.’

He pushed the girl away as if she didn’t exist and ploughed through the crowd towards me. Nobody got annoyed even when he put a drink or two over. Mostly they just smiled and one or two of the men slapped him on the back and called good-naturedly.

He’d been drinking, that much was obvious and greeted me like a long lost brother. ‘What kept you? Christ, but I’m starving. Come on, I’ve got a table laid on out on the terrace where we can hear ourselves think.’

He took me by the elbow and guided me through the crowd to a long, sliding shutter on the far side. As he started to pull it back, the girl in the red satin dress arrived and flung her arms around his neck.

He grabbed her wrists and she gave a short cry of pain, that strength of his again, I suppose. He no longer looked anything like as genial and somehow, his bad Portuguese made it sound worse.

‘Later, angel – later, I’ll screw you just as much as you damn well want only now, I want a little time with my friend. Okay?’

When he released her she backed away, looked scared if anything, turned and melted into the crowd. I suppose it was about then I noticed that the women vastly outnumbered the men and commented on the fact.

‘What is this, a whorehouse?’

‘Only the best in town.’

He pulled back the shutter and led the way out to a private section of the deck with a canvas awning from which the rain dripped steadily. A table, laid for two, stood by the rail under a pressure lamp.

He shouted in Portuguese, ‘Heh, Pedro, let’s have some action here.’ Then he motioned me to one of the seats and produced a bottle of wine from a bucket of water under the table. ‘You like this stuff – Pouilly Fuisse? They get it for me special. I used to drink it by the bucketful in the old days in France.’

I tried some. It was ice-cold, sharp and fresh and instantly exhilarating. ‘You were on the Western Front?’

‘I sure was. Three years of it. Not many lasted that long, I can tell you.’

Which at least explained the Captain bit. I said, ‘But America didn’t come into the war till nineteen-seventeen.’

‘Oh, that.’ He leaned back out of the way as a waiter in a white shirt and cummerbund appeared with a tray to serve us. ‘I flew for the French with the Lafayette Escadrille. Nieuport Scouts then Spads.’ He leaned forward to refill my glass. ‘How old are you, Mallory?’

‘Twenty-three.’

He laughed. ‘I’d twenty-six kills to my credit when I was your age. Been shot down four times, once by von Richthofen himself.’

Strange, but at that stage of things I never doubted him for a second. Stated baldly, what he had said could easily sound like boasting and yet it was his manner which said most and he was casual in the extreme as if these things were really of no account.

We had fish soup, followed by a kind of casserole of chicken stewed in its own blood, which tasted a lot better than it sounds. This was backed up by eggs and olives fried, as usual, in olive oil. And there was a mountain of rice and tomatoes in vinegar.

Hannah never stopped talking and yet ate and drank enormously with little visible effect except to make him talk more loudly and more rapidly than ever.

‘It was a hard school out there, believe me. You had to be good to survive and the longer you lasted, the better your chances.’

‘That makes sense, I suppose,’ I said.

‘It sure does. You don’t need luck up there, kid. You need to know what you’re doing. Flying’s about the most unnatural thing a man can do.’

When the waiter came to clear the table, I thanked him. Hannah said, ‘That’s pretty good Portuguese you speak. Better than mine.’

‘I spent a year on the lower Amazon when I first came to South America,’ I told him. ‘Flying out of Belem for a mining company that had diamond concessions along the Xingu River.’

He seemed impressed. ‘I hear that’s rough country. Some of the worst Indians in Brazil.’

‘Which was why I switched to Peru. Mountain flying may be trickier, but it’s a lot more fun than what you’re doing.’

He said, ‘You were pretty good out there today. I’ve been flying for better than twenty years and I can’t think of more than half a dozen guys I’ve known who could have landed that Vega. Where did you learn to fly like that?’

‘I had an uncle who was in the R.F.C.,’ I said. ‘Died a couple of years back. He used to take me up in a Puss Moth when I was a kid. When I went to University, I joined the Air Squadron which led to a Pilot Officer’s commission in the Auxiliary Air Force. That got me plenty of weekend flying.’

‘Then what?’

‘Qualified for a commercial pilot’s licence in my spare time, then found pilots were ten-a-penny.’

‘Except in South America.’

‘Exactly.’ I was more than a little tight by then and yet the words seemed to spill out with no difficulty. ‘All I ever wanted to do was fly. Know what I mean? I was willing to go anywhere.’

‘You certainly were if you drew the Xingu. What are you going to do now? If you’re stuck for a job I might be able to help.’

‘Flying, you mean?’

He nodded. ‘I handle the mail and general freight route to Landro which is about two hundred miles up the Negro from here. I also cover the Rio das Mortes under government contract. Lot of diamond prospecting going on up there these days.’

‘The Rio das Mortes?’ I said. ‘The River of Death? You must be joking. That’s worse than the Xingu any day. I’ve been there. I took some government men to a Mission Station called Santa Helena maybe two years ago. That would be before your time. You know the place?’

‘I call there regularly.’

‘You used a phrase today,’ I said. ‘The Last Place God Made. Well, that’s the Rio das Mortes, Hannah. During the rainy season it never stops. At other times of the year it just rains all day. They’ve got flies up there that lay eggs in your eyeballs. Most parts of the Amazon would consider the pirhana bad enough because a shoal of them can reduce a man to a skeleton in three minutes flat, but on the Mortes, they have a microscopic item with spines that crawls up your backside given half a chance and it takes a knife to get him out again.’

‘You don’t need to tell me about the damn place,’ he said. ‘I’ve been there. Came in with three Hayleys and high hopes a year ago. All I’ve got left is the baby you arrived in today. Believe me, when my government contract’s up in three months you won’t see me for dust.’

‘What happened to the other two planes?’

‘Kaput. Lousy pilots.’

‘Then why do you need me?’

‘Because it takes two planes to keep my schedules going or to put it more exactly, I can’t quite do it with one. I managed to pick up an old biplane the other day from a planter down-river who’s selling up.’

‘What is it?’

‘A Bristol.’

He was in the act of filling my glass and I started so much that I spilled most of my wine across the table. ‘You mean a Brisfit? A Bristol fighter? Christ, they were flying those over twenty years ago on the Western Front.’

He nodded. ‘I should know. Oh, she’s old all right, but then she only has to hold together another three months. Do one or two of the easy river trips. If you’d wanted the job, you could have had it, but it doesn’t matter. There’s a guy in at the weekend who’s already been in touch with me. Some Portuguese who’s been flying for a mining company in Venezuela that went bust which means I’ll get him cheap.’

‘Well, that’s okay then,’ I said.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Go home – what else.’

‘What about money? Can you manage?’

‘Just about.’ I patted my wallet. ‘I won’t be taking home any pot of gold, but I’ll be back in one piece and that’s all that counts. There’s a hard time coming from what I read of events in Europe. They’re going to need men with my kind of flying experience, the way things are looking.’

‘The Nazis, you mean?’ he nodded. ‘You could be right. A bunch of bastards, from what I hear. You should meet my maintenance eingineer, Mannie Sterne. Now he’s a German. Was a professor of engineering at one of their universities or something. They arrested him because he was a Jew. Put him in some kind of hell-hole they call a concentration camp. He was lucky to get out with a whole skin. Came off a freighter right here in Manaus without a penny in his pocket.’

‘Which was when you met him?’

‘Best day’s work of my life. Where aero engines are concerned the guy’s the original genius.’ He re-filled my glass. ‘What kind of stuff were you flying with the R.A.F. then?’

‘Wapitis mainly. The Auxiliaries get the oldest aircraft.’

‘The stuff the regulars don’t want?’

‘That’s right. I’ve even flown Bristols. There were still one or two around on some stations. And then there was the Mark One Fury. I got about thirty hours in one of those just before I left.’

‘What’s that – a fighter?’ I nodded and he sighed and shook his head. ‘Christ, but I envy you, kid, going back to all that. I used to be Ace-of-Aces, did you know that? Knocked out four Fockers in one morning before I went down in flames. That was my last show. Captain Samuel B. Hannah, all of twenty-three and everything but the Congressional Medal of Honour.’

‘I thought that was Eddie Rickenbacker?’ I said. ‘Ace-of-Aces, I mean.’

‘I spent the last six months of the war in hospital,’ he answered.

Those blue eyes stared vacantly into the past, caught for a moment by some ancient hurt, and then he seemed to pull himself back to reality, gave me that crooked grin and raised his glass.

‘Happy landings.’

The wine had ceased to effect me or so it seemed for it went down in one single easy swallow. The final bottle was empty. He called for more, then lurched across to the sliding door and pulled it back.

The music was like a blow in the face, frenetic, exciting, filling the night, mingling with the laughter, voices singing. The girl in the red satin dress moved up the steps to join him and he pulled her into his arms and she kissed him passionately. I sat there feeling curiously detached as the waiter refilled my glass and Hannah, surfacing grinned across at me.

The girl who slid into the opposite seat was part Indian to judge by the eyes that slanted up above high cheekbones. The face itself was calm and remote, framed by dark, shoulder-length hair and she wore a plain white cotton dress which buttoned down the front.

She helped herself to an empty glass and I reached for the newly opened bottle of wine and filled it for her. Hannah came across, put a hand under her chin and tilted her face. She didn’t like that, I could tell by the way her eyes changed.

He said, ‘You’re new around here, aren’t you? What’s your name?’

‘Maria, senhor.’

‘Maria of the Angels, eh? I like that. You know me?’

‘Everyone along the river knows you, senhor.’

He patted her cheek. ‘Good girl. Senhor Mallory is a friend of mine – a good friend. You look after him. I’ll see you’re all right.’

‘I would have thought the senhor well able to look after himself.’

He laughed harshly. ‘You may be right, at that.’ He turned and went back to the girl in the satin dress and took her down to the dance floor.

Maria of the Angels toasted me without a word and sipped a little of her wine. I emptied my glass in return, stood up and went to the rail. My head seemed to swell like a balloon. I tried breathing deeply and leaned out over the rail, letting the rain blow against my face.

I hadn’t heard her move, but she was there behind me and when I turned, she put her hands lightly on my shoulders. ‘You would like to dance, senhor?’

I shook my head. ‘Too crowded in there.’

She turned without a word, crossed to the sliding door and closed it. The music was suddenly muted, yet plain enough a slow, sad samba with something of the night in it.

She came back to the rail and melted into me, one arm sliding behind my neck. Her body started to move against mine, easing me into the rhythm and I was lost, utterly and completely. A name like Maria and the face of a madonna to go with it perhaps, but the rest of her…

I wasn’t completely certain of the sequence of things after that. The plain truth was that I was so drunk, I didn’t really know what I was doing.

There was a point when I surfaced to find myself on some other part of the deck with her tight in my arms and then she was pulling away from me, telling me this was no good, that there were too many people.

She must have made the obvious suggestion – that we go to her place – because the next thing I recall is being led across that swaying catwalk to the pier.

The rain was falling harder than ever now and when we went up the steps to the pier, we ran into the full force of it. The thin cotton dress was soaked within seconds, clinging to her body, the nipples blossoming on her breasts, filling me with excitement.

I reached out for her, pulling all that ripeness into me, my hands fastening over the firm buttocks. The sap was rising with a vengeance. I kissed her pretty savagely and after a while she pushed me away and patted my face.

‘God, but you’re beautiful,’ I said and leaned back against a stack of packing cases.

She smiled, for the first and only time I could recall in our acquaintance as if truly delighted at the compliment, a lamp turning on inside her. Then she lifted her right knee into my crotch with all her force.

I was so drunk, that I was not immediately conscious of pain, only of being down on the boardwalk, knees up to my chest.

I rolled over on my back, was aware of her on her knees beside me, hands busy in my pockets. Some basic instinct of self-preservation tried to bring me back to life when I saw the wallet in her hands, a knowledge that it contained everything of importance to me, not only material things, but my present future.

As she stood up, I reached for her ankle and got the heel of her shoe squarely in the centre of my palm. She kicked out again, sending me rolling towards the edge of the pier.

I was saved from going over by some sort of raised edging, and hung there, scrabbling for a hold frantically, no strength in me at all. She started towards me presumably to finish it off and then several things seemed to happen at once.

I heard my name, clear through the rain, saw three men halfway across the catwalk, Hannah in the lead. He had that .45 automatic in his hand and a shot echoed flatly through the rain.

Too late, for Maria of the Angels was already long gone into the darkness.

3
The Immelmann Turn

The stern-wheeler left on time the following morning, but without me. At high noon when she must have been thirty or forty miles down-river, I was sitting outside the comandante’s office again for the second time in two days, listening to the voices droning away inside.

After a while, the outside door opened and Hannah came in. He was wearing flying clothes and looked tired, his face unshaven, the eyes hollow from lack of sleep. He’d had a contract run to make at ten o’clock, only a short hop of fifty miles or so down-river for one of the mining companies, but something that couldn’t be avoided.

He sat on the edge of the sergeant’s desk and lit a cigarette, regarding me anxiously. ‘How do you feel?’

‘About two hundred years old.’

‘God damn that bitch.’ He got to his feet and paced restlessly back and forth across the room. ‘If there was only something I could do.’ He turned to face me, really looking his age for the first time since I’d known him. ‘I might as well level with you, kid. Every damn thing I buy round here from fuel to booze is on credit. The Bristol ate up all the ready cash I had. When my government contract is up in another three months, I’m due a reasonable enough bonus, but until then…’

‘Look, forget about it,’ I said.

‘I took you to the bloody place, didn’t I?’

He genuinely felt responsible, I could see that and couldn’t do much about it, a hard thing for a man like him to accept, for his position in other people’s eyes, their opinion was important to him.

‘I’m free, white and twenty-one, isn’t that what you say in the States?’ I said. ‘Anything I got, I asked for, so have a decent cigarette for a change and shut up.’

I held out the tin of Balkan Sobranie and the door to the comandante’s office opened and the sergeant appeared.

‘You will come in now, Senhor Malllory?’

I stood up and walked into the room rather slowly which was understandable under the circumstances. Hannah simply followed me inside without asking anyone’s permission.

The comandante nodded to him. ‘Senhor Hannah.’

‘Maybe there’s something I can do,’ Hannah said.

The comandante managed to look as sorrowful as only a Latin can and shook his head. ‘A bad business, Senhor Mallory. You say there was a thousand cruzeiros in the wallet besides your passport?’

I sank into the nearest chair. ‘Nearer to eleven hundred.’

‘You could have had her for the night for five, senhor. To carry that kind of money on your person was extremely foolish.’

‘No sign of her at all, then?’ Hannah put in. ‘Surely to God somebody must know the bitch.’

‘You know the type, senhor. Working the river, moving from town to town. No one at The Little Boat had ever seen her before. She rented a room at a house near the waterfront, but had only been there three days.’

‘What you’re trying to say is that she’s well away from Manaus by now and the chances of catching her are remote,’ I said.

‘Exactly, senhor. The truth is always painful. She was three-quarters Indian. She will probably go back to her people for a while. All she has to do is take off her dress. They all look the same.’ He helped himself to a long black cigar from a box on his desk. ‘None of which helps you. I am sensible of this. Have you funds that you can draw on?’

‘Not a penny.’

‘So?’ He frowned. ‘The passport is not so difficult. An application to the British Consul in Belem backed by a letter from me should remedy that situation within a week or two, but as the law stands at present, all foreign nationals are required to produce evidence of employment if they do not possess private means.’

I knew exactly what he meant. There were public work gangs for people like me.

Hannah moved round to the other end of the room where he could look at me and nodded briefly. He said calmly, ‘No difficulty there. Senhor Mallory was considering coming to work for me anyway.’

‘As a pilot?’ The comandante’s eyes went up and he turned to me. ‘This is so, senhor?’

‘Quite true,’ I said.

Hannah grinned slightly and the comandante looked distinctly relieved ‘All is in order then.’ He stood up and held out his hand. ‘If anything of interest does materialise in connection with this unfortunate affair, senhor, I’ll know where to find you.’

I shook hands – it would have seemed churlish not to – and shuffled outside. I kept right on going and had reached the pillared entrance hall before Hannah caught up with me. I sat down on a marble bench in a patch of sunlight and he stood in front of me looking genuinely uncertain.

‘Did I do right, back there?’

I nodded wearily. ‘I’m obliged to you – really, but what about this Portuguese you were expecting?’

‘He loses, that’s all.’ He sat down beside me. ‘Look, I know you wanted to get home, but it could be worse. You can move in with Mannie at Landro and a room at the Palace on me between trips. Your keep and a hundred dollars American a week.’

The terms were generous by any standards. I said, ‘That’s fine by me.’

‘There’s just one snag. Like I said, I’m living on credit at the moment. That means I won’t have the cash to pay you till I get that government bonus at the end of my contract which means sticking out this last three months with me. Can you face that?’

‘I don’t have much choice, do I?’

I got up and walked out into the entrance. He said, with what sounded like genuine admiration in his voice, ‘By God but you’re a cool one, Mallory. Doesn’t anything ever throw you?’

‘Last night was last night,’ I told him. ‘Today’s something else again. Do we fly up to Landro this afternoon?’

He stared at me, a slight frown on his face, seemed about to make some sort of comment, then obviously changed his mind.

‘We ought to,’ he said. ‘There’s the fortnightly run to the mission station at Santa Helena, to make tomorrow. There’s only one thing. The Bristol ought to go, too. I want Mannie to check that engine out as soon as possible. That means both of us will have to fly. Do you feel up to it?’

‘That’s what I’m getting paid for,’ I said and shuffled down the steps towards the cab waiting at the bottom.

The airstrip Hannah was using at Manaus at that time wasn’t much. A wooden administration hut with a small tower and a row of decrepit hangar sheds backed on to the river, roofed with rusting corrugated iron. It was a derelict sort of place and the Hayley, the only aircraft on view, looked strangely out of place, its scarlet and silver trim gleaming in the afternoon sun.

It was siesta so there was no one around. I dropped my canvas grip on the ground beside the Hayley. It was so hot that I took off my flying jacket – and very still except for an occasional roar from a bull-throated howler monkey in the trees at the river’s edge.

There was a sudden rumble behind and when I turned, Hannah was pushing back the sliding door on one of the sheds.

‘Well, here she is,’ he said.

The Bristol fighter was one of the really great combat aircraft of the war and it served overseas with the R.A.F. until well into the thirties. As I’ve said, there were still one or two around on odd stations in England when I was learning to fly and I’d had seven or eight hours in them.

But this one was an original – a veritable museum piece. She had a fuselage which had been patched so many times it was ridiculous and in one place, it was still possible to detect the faded rondel of the R.A.F.

Before I could make any kind of comment, Hannah said, ‘Don’t be put off by the state of the fuselage. She’s a lot better than she looks. Structurally as sound as a bell and I don’t think there’s much wrong with the engine. The guy I bought it from had her for fifteen years and didn’t use her all that much. God knows what her history was before that. The log book’s missing.’

‘Have you flown her much?’ I asked.

‘Just over a hundred miles. She handled well. Didn’t give me any kind of trouble at all.’

The Bristol was a two-seater. I climbed up on the lower port wing and peered into the pilot’s cockpit. It had exactly the right kind of smell – a compound of leather, oil and petrol – something that had never yet failed to excite me and I reached out to touch the stick in a kind of reluctant admiration. The only modern addition was a radio which must have been fitted when the new law made them mandatory in Brazil.

‘It really must be an original. Basket seat and leather cushions. All the comforts of home.’

‘They were a great plane,’ Hannah said soberly.

I dropped to the ground. ‘Didn’t I read somewhere that van Richthofen shot down four in one day?’

‘There were reasons for that. The pilot had a fixed machine-gun up front – a Vickers. The observer usually carried one or two free-mounting Lewis guns in the rear. At first, they used the usual two-seater technique.’

‘Which meant the man in the rear cockpit did all the shooting?’

‘Exactly, and that was no good. They sustained pretty heavy losses at first until pilots discovered she was so manoeuvrable you could fly her like a single-seater.’

‘With the fixed machine-gun as the main weapon?’

‘That’s right. The observer’s Lewis just became a useful extra. They used to carry a couple of bombs. Not much – around two hundred and forty pounds – but it means you can take a reasonable pay load. If you look, you’ll see the rear cockpit has been extended at some time.’

I peered over. ‘You could get a couple of passengers in there now.’

‘I suppose so, but it isn’t necessary. The Hayley can handle that end of things. Let’s get her outside.’

We took a wing each and pushed her out into the bright sunshine. In spite of her shabby appearance; she looked strangely menacing and exactly what she was supposed to be – a formidable fighting machine, waiting for something to happen.

‘I’ve known people who love horses – any horse – with every fibre of their being, an instinctive response that simply cannot be denied. Aeroplanes have always affected me in exactly the same way and this was an aeroplane and a half in spite of her shabby appearance and comparatively slow speed by modern standards. There was something indefinable here that could not be stated. Of one thing I was certain – it was me she was waiting for.

Hannah said, ‘You can take the Hayley. I’ll follow on in this.’

I shook my head. ‘No, thanks. This is what you hired me to fly.’

He looked a little dubious. ‘You’re sure about that?’

I didn’t bother to reply, simply went and got my canvas grip and threw it into the rear cockpit. There was a parachute in there, but I didn’t bother to get it out, just pulled on my flying jacket, helmet and goggles.

He unfolded a map on the ground and we crouched beside it. The Rio das Mortes branched out of the Negro to the north-east about a hundred and fifty miles farther on. There was a military post called Forte Franco at its mouth and Landro was another fifty miles upstream.

‘Stick to the river all the way,’ Hannah said. ‘Don’t try cutting across the jungle whatever you do. Go down there and you’re finished. It’s Huna country all the way up the Mortes. They make those Indians you mentioned along the Xingu look like Sunday-school stuff and there’s nothing they like better than getting their hands on a white man.’

‘Doesn’t anyone have any contacts with them?’

‘Only the nuns at the medical mission at Santa Helena and it’s a miracle they’ve survived as long as they have. One of the mining companies was having some trouble with them the other year so they called the head men of the various sub-tribes together to talk things over, then machine-gunned them from cover. Killed a couple of dozen, but they botched things up and about eight got away. Since then it’s been war. It’s all martial law up there. Not that it means anything. The military aren’t up to much. A colonel and fifty men with two motor launches at Forte Franco and that’s it.’

I folded the map and shoved it inside my flying jacket. ‘From the sound of it, I’d say the Hunas have a point.’

He laughed grimly. ‘You won’t find many to sympathise with that statement around Landro, Mallory. They’re a bunch of Stone Age savages. Vermin. If you’d seen some of the things they’ve done…’

He walked across to the Hayley, opened the cabin door and climbed inside. When he got out again, he was carrying a shotgun.

‘Have you got that revolver of yours handy?’ I nodded and he tossed the shotgun to me and a box of cartridges. ‘Better take this as well, just in case. Best close-quarters weapon I know; 10-gauge, 6-shot automatic. The loads are double-O steel buckshot. I’d use it on myself before I let those bastards get their hands on me.’

I held it in my hands for a moment, then put it into the rear cockpit. ‘Are you flying with me?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ve got things to do. I’ll follow in half an hour and still beat you there. I’ll give a shout on the radio when I pass.’

There was a kind of boasting in what he said without need, for the Bristol couldn’t hope to compete with the Hayley when it came to speed, but I let it pass.

Instead I said, ‘Just one thing. As I remember, you need a chain of three men pulling the propeller to start the engine.’

‘Not with me around.’

It was a simple statement of fact made without pride for his strength as I was soon to see, was remarkable. I stepped up on to the port wing and eased myself into that basket seat with its leather cushions and pushed my feet into the toestraps at either end of the rudder bar.

I made my cockpit checks, gave Hannah a signal and wound the starting magneto while he pulled the propeller over a compression stroke. The engine, a Rolls-Royce Falcon, exploded into life instantly.

The din was terrific, a feature of the engine at low speeds. Hannah moved out of the way and I taxied away from the hangars towards the leeward boundary of the field and turned into the wind.

I pulled down my goggles, checked the sky to make sure I wasn’t threatened by anything else coming in to land and opened the throttle. Up came the tail as I pushed the stick forward just a touch, gathering speed. As she yawed to starboard in a slight cross-wind, I applied a little rudder correction. A hundred and fifty yards, a slight backward pressure on the stick and she was airborne.

At two hundred feet, I eased back the throttle to her climbing speed which was all of sixty-five miles an hour, banked steeply at five hundred feet and swooped back across the airfield.

I could see Hannah quite plainly, hands shading his eyes from the sun as he gazed up at me. What happened then was entirely spontaneous: produced by the sheer exhilaration of being at the controls of that magnificent plane as much as by any desire to impress him.

The great German ace, Max Immelmann, came up with a brilliant ploy that gave him two shots at an enemy in a dog-fight for the price of one and without losing height. The famous Immelmann Turn, biblical knowledge for any fighter pilot.

I tried it now, diving in on Hannah, pulled up in a half-loop, rolled out on top and came back over his head at fifty feet.

He didn’t move a muscle, simply stood there, shaking a fist at me. I waved back, took the Bristol low over the trees and turned up-river.

You don’t need to keep your hands on a Bristol’s controls at cruising speed. If you want an easy time of it, all you have to do is adjust the tailplane incidence control and sit back, but that wasn’t for me. I was enjoying being in control, being at one with the machine if you like. Someone once said the Bristol was like a thoroughbred hunter with a delicate mouth and a stout heart and that afternoon over the Negro, I knew exactly what he meant.

On either side, the jungle, gigantic walls of bamboo and liana which even the sun couldn’t get through. Below, the river, clouds of scarlet ibis scattering at my approach.

This was flying – how flying was meant to be and I went down to a couple of hundred feet, remembering that at that height it was possible to get maximum speed out of her. One hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. I sat back, hands steady on the stick and concentrated on getting to Landro before Hannah.

I almost made it, banking across the army post of Forte Franco at the mouth of the Rio das Mortes an hour and a quarter after leaving Manaus.

I was ten miles upstream, pushing her hard at two hundred feet when a thunderbolt descended. I didn’t even know the Hayley was there until he dived on my tail, pulled up in a half-loop, rolled out on top in a perfect Immelmann Turn and roared, towards me head-on. I held the Bristol on course and he pulled up above my head.

‘Bang, you’re dead.’ His voice crackled in my earphones. ‘I was doing Immelmanns for real when you were still breast-feeding, kid. See you in Landro.’

He banked away across the jungle where he had told me not to go and roared into the distance. For a wild moment, I wondered if he might be challenging me to follow, but resisted the impulse. He’d lost two pilots already on the Mortes. No sense in making it three unless I had to.

I throttled back and continued up-river at a leisurely hundred miles an hour, whistling softly between my teeth.

4
Landro

I came to Landro, dark clouds chasing after me, the horizon closing in – another of those sudden tropical rainstorms in the offing.

It was exactly as I had expected – a clearing in the jungle at the edge of the river. A crumbling jetty, piroques drawn up on the beach beside it, a church surrounded by a scattering of wooden houses and not much else. In other words, a typical up-river settlement.

The landing strip was at the north end of the place, a stretch of campo at least three hundred yards long by a hundred across. There was a windsock on a crude pole, lifting to one side in a slight breeze and a hangar roofed with corrugated iron. Hannah was down there now with three other men, pushing the Hayley into the hangar. He turned as I came in low across the field and waved.

The Bristol had one characteristic which made a good landing difficult for the novice. The undercarriage included rubber bungees which had a catapulting effect if you landed too fast or too hard, bouncing you back into the air like a rubber ball.

I was damned if I was going to make that kind of mistake in front of Hannah. I turned down-wind for my approach. A left-hand turn, I throttled back and adjusted the tail trimmer. I glided down steadily at just on sixty, selected my landing path and turned into the wind at five hundred feet, crossing the end of the field at a hundred and fifty.

Landing speed for a Bristol is forty-five miles an hour and can be made without power if you want to. I closed the throttle, eased back the stick to flatten my glide and floated in, the only sound the wind whispering through the struts.

I moved the stick back gradually to prevent her sinking and stalled into a perfect three-point landing, touching the ground so gently that I hardly felt a thing.

I rolled to a halt close to the hangar and sat there for a while, savouring the silence after the roar of the engine, then I pushed up my goggles and unstrapped myself. Hannah came round on the port side followed by a small, wiry man in overalls that had once been white and were now black with oil and grease.

‘I told you he was good, Mannie,’ Hannah said.

‘You did indeed, Sam.’ His companion smiled up at me.

The liking between us was immediate and mutually recognised. One of those odd occasions when you feel that you’ve known someone a hell of a long time.

Except for a very slight accent, his English was perfect. As I discovered later, he was fifty at that time and looked ten years older which was hardly surprising for the Nazis had imprisoned him for just over a year. He certainly didn’t look like a professor. As I’ve said, he was small and rather insignificant, untidy, iron-grey hair falling across his forehead, the face brown and wizened. But then there were the eyes, clear grey and incredibly calm, the eyes of a man who had seen the worst life had to offer and still had faith.

‘Emmanuel Sterne, Mr Mallory,’ he said as I dropped to the ground.

‘Neil,’ I told him and held out my hand.

He smiled then, very briefly and thunder rumbled across the river, the first heavy spots of rain staining the brown earth at my feet.

‘Here we go again,’ Hannah said. ‘Let’s get this thing inside quick. I don’t think this is going to be any five-minute shower.’

He gave a yell and the other two men arrived on the run. They were simply day labourers who helped out with the heavy work when needed for a pittance. Undernourished, gaunt-looking men in straw hats and ragged shirts.

There were no doors to the hangar. It was really only a roof on posts, but there was plenty of room for the Bristol beside the Hayley. We had barely got it in when the flood descended, rattling on the corrugated-iron roof like a dozen machine-guns. Outside, an impenetrable grey curtain came down between us and the river.

Mannie Sterne was standing looking at the Bristol, hands on hips. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘Really beautiful.’

‘He’s fallen in love again.’ Hannah took down a couple of old oilskin coats from a hook and threw me one. ‘I’ll take you to the house. You coming, Mannie?’

Mannie was already at the engine cowling with a spanner. He shook his head without looking round. ‘Later – I’ll be along later.’

It was as if we had ceased to exist. Hannah shrugged and ducked out into the rain. I got my canvas grip from the observer’s cockpit and ran after him.

The house was at the far end of the field, not much more than a wooden hut with a veranda and the usual corrugated iron roof. It was built on stilts as they all were, mainly because of the dampness from all that heavy rain, but also in an attempt to keep out soldier ants and other examples of jungle wildlife.

He went up the steps to the veranda and he flung open a louvred door and led the way in. The floor was plain wood with one or two Indian rugs here and there. Most of the furniture was bamboo.

‘Kitchen through there,’ he said. ‘Shower-room next to it. There’s a precipitation tank on the roof so we don’t lack for a generous supply of decent water, it rains so damn much.’

‘All the comforts of home,’ I said.

‘I would think that something of an overstatement.’ He jerked his thumb at a door to the left. ‘That’s my room. You can share with Mannie over here.’

He opened the door, stood to one side and motioned me through. It was surprisingly large and airy, bamboo shutters open to the veranda. There were three single beds, another of those Indian rugs on the floor and there were actually some books on a shelf beside the only bed which was made up.

I picked one up and Hannah laughed shortly. ‘As you can see, Mannie likes a good read. Turned Manaus upside down for that little lot.’

The book was Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I said, ‘This must have been like putting his pan in the river for water and coming up with a diamond.’

‘Don’t tell me you go for that kind of stuff, too?’ he looked genuinely put out. ‘God help me, now I do need a drink.’

He went back into the living-room. I chose one of the unoccupied beds, made it up with blankets from a cupboard in the corner, then unpacked my grip. When I returned to the other room he was standing on the veranda, a glass in one hand, a bottle of Gordon’s gin in the other.

The rain curtain was almost impenetrable, the first few wooden huts on their stilts at the edge of town, the only other sign of life.

‘Sometimes when it gets like this, I could go crazy,’ he said. ‘It’s as if this is all there is. As if I’m never going to get out.’

He tried to re-fill his glass, discovered the bottle was empty and threw it out into the rain with a curse. ‘I need a drink. Come on – if you’re not too tired I’ll take you up town and show you the sights. An unforgettable experience.’

I put on my oilskin coat again and an old straw sombrero I found hanging behind the bedroom door. When I returned to the veranda he asked me if I was still carrying my revolver. As it happened, it was in one of my flying-jacket pockets.

He nodded in satisfaction. ‘You’ll find everybody goes armed here. It’s that kind of place.’

We plunged out into the rain and moved towards the town. I think it was one of the most depressing sights I have ever seen in my life. A scabrous rash of decaying wooden huts on stilts, streets which had quickly turned into thick, glutinous mud. Filthy, ragged little children, many of them with open sores on their faces, played listlessly under the huts and on the verandas above, people stared into the rain, gaunt, hopeless, most of them trapped in that living hell for what remained of their wretched lives, no hope on earth of getting out.

The church was more substantial and included a brick and adobe tower. I commented on that and Hannah laughed shortly. ‘They don’t even have a regular priest. Old guy called Father Conté who works with the nuns up at Santa Helena drops in every so often to say a Mass or two, baptise the babies and so on. He’ll be coming back with us tomorrow, by the way.’

‘You want me to go with you?’

‘I don’t see why not.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s only a hundred-mile trip. Give you a chance to fly the Hayley. We’ll have a passenger. Colonel Alberto from Forte Franco. He’ll arrive about ten in the morning by boat.’

‘What’s he do? Some kind of regular inspection?’

‘You could say that.’ Hannah smiled cynically. ‘The nuns up there are American. Little Sisters of Pity and very holy ladies indeed. The kind who have a mission. Know what I mean? The government’s been trying to get them to move for a year or so now because of the way the Huna have been acting up, only they won’t go. Alberto keeps trying, though, I’ll say that for him.’

In the centre of the town, we came to the only two-storeyed building in the place. The board above the wide veranda said Hotel and two or three locals sat at a table without talking, staring lifelessly into space, rain blowing in on them.

‘The guy who runs this place is important enough to be polite to,’ Hannah observed. ‘Eugenio Figueiredo. He’s the government agent here so you’ll be seeing a lot of him. All mail and freight has to be channelled through him for the entire upper Mortes region.’

‘Are they still keen on the diamond laws as they used to be?’ I asked.

‘And then some. Diamond prospectors aren’t allowed to work on their own up here. They have to belong to an organised group called a garimpa and the bossman holds a licence for all of them. Just to make sure the government gets its cut, everything they find has to be handed over to the local agent who issues a receipt and sends the loot down-river in a sealed bag. The pay-off comes later.’

‘A hell of a temptation to hang on to a few.’

‘And that draws you a minimum of five years in the penal colony at Machados which could fairly be described as an open grave in a swamp about three hundred miles up the Negro.’

He opened the door of the hotel and led the way in. I didn’t care for the place from the start. A long, dark room with a bar down one side and a considerable number of tables and chairs. It was the smell that put me off more than anything else, compounded of stale liquor, human sweat and urine in about equal proportions and there were too many flies about for my liking.

There were only two customers. One with his back against the wall by the door, glass in hand, the same vacant look on his face as I had noticed with the men on the veranda. His companion was sprawled across the table, his straw hat on the floor, a jug overturned, its contents dribbling through the bamboo into a sizeable pool.

‘Cachaca,’ Hannah said. ‘They say it rots the brain, as well as the liver, but it’s all these poor bastards can afford.’ He raised his voice, ‘Heh, Figueiredo, what about some service.’

He unbuttoned his coat and dropped into a basket chair by one of the open shutters. A moment later, I heard a step and a man moved through the bead curtain at the back of the bar.

Eugenio Figueiredo wasn’t by any means a large man, but he was fat enough for life to be far from comfortable for him in a climate such as that one. The first time I saw him, he was shining with sweat in spite of the palm fan in his right hand which he used vigorously. His shirt clung to his body, the moisture soaking through and the stink of him was the strongest I have known in a human being.

He was somewhere in his middle years, a minor public official in spite of his responsibilities, too old for change and without the slightest hope of preferment. As much a victim of fate as anyone else in Landro. His amiability was surprising in the circumstances.

‘Ah, Captain Hannah.’

An Indian woman came through the curtain behind him. He said something to her then advanced to join us.

Hannah made the introduction casually as he lit a cigarette. Figueiredo extended a moist hand. ‘At your orders, senhor.’

‘At yours,’ I murmured.

The smell was really overpowering although Hannah didn’t appear in any way put out. I sat on the sill by the open shutter which helped and Figueiredo sank into a basket chair at the table.

‘You are an old Brazilian hand, I think, Senhor Mallory,’ he observed. ‘Your Portuguese is too excellent for it to be otherwise.’

‘Lately I’ve been in Peru,’ I said. ‘But before that, I did a year on the Xingu.’

‘If you could survive that, you could survive anything.’

He crossed himself piously. The Indian woman arrived with a tray which she set down on the table. There was Bourbon, a bottle of some kind of spa water and three glasses.

‘You will join me senhors?’

Hannah half-filled a sizeable tumbler and didn’t bother with water. I took very little, in fact only drank at all as a matter of courtesy which, I think, Figueiredo was well aware of.

Hannah swallow it down and helped himself to more, staring morosely into the rain. ‘Look at it,’ he said. ‘What a bloody place.’

It was one of those statements that didn’t require any comment. The facts spoke for themselves. A group of men turned out from between two houses and trailed towards the hotel, heads down, in a kind of uniform of rubber poncho and straw sombrero. ‘Who have we got here?’ Hannah demanded.

Figueiredo leaned forward, the fan in his hand ceasing for a moment. It commenced to flutter again. ‘Garimpeiros,’ he said. ‘Avila’s bunch. Came in last night. Lost two men in a brush with the Huna.’

Hannah poured another enormous whisky. ‘From what I hear of that bastard, he probably shot them himself.’

There were five of them, as unsavoury-looking a bunch as I had ever seen. Little to choose between any of them really. The same gaunt, fleshless faces, the same touch of fever in all the eyes.

Avila was the odd man out. A big man. Almost as large as Hannah, with a small, cruel mouth that was effeminate in its way although that was perhaps suggested more by the pencil-thin moustache which must have taken him considerable pains to cultivate.

He nodded to Figueiredo and Hannah, the eyes pausing fractionally on me, then continued to a table at the far end of the bar, his men trailing after him. When they took off their ponchos it became immediately obvious that they were all armed to the teeth and most of them carried a machete in a leather sheath as well as a holstered revolver.

The Indian woman went to serve them. One of them put a hand up her skirt. She didn’t try to resist, simply stood there like some dumb animal while another reached up to fondle her breasts.

‘Nice people,’ Hannah said, although Figueiredo seemed completely unperturbed which was surprising in view of the fact that the woman, as I learned later, was his wife.

She was finally allowed to go for the drinks when Avila intervened. He lit a cigarette, produced a pack of cards and looked across at us. ‘You would care to join us, gentlemen?’ He spoke in quiet reasonable English. ‘A few hands of poker perhaps?’

They all turned to look at us and there was a short pause. It was as if everyone waited for something to happen and there was a kind of menace in the air.

Hannah emptied his glass and stood up. ‘Why not? Anything’s better than nothing in this hole.’

I said, ‘Not for me. I’ve got things to do. Another time, perhaps.’

Hannah shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’

He picked up the bottle of Bourbon and started towards the other end of the bar. Figueiredo tried to stand up, swaying so alarmingly that I moved forward quickly and took his arm.

He said softly, lips hardly moving. ‘Give him an hour then come back for him on some pretence or other. He is not liked here. There could be trouble.’

The smile hooked firmly into place, he turned and went towards the others and I moved to the door. As I opened it, Avila called, ‘Our company is not good enough for you, senhor?’

But I would not be drawn – not then at least, for I think that out of some strange foreknowledge, I knew that enough would come later.

When I ran out of the rain into the shelter of that primitive hangar, I found Mannie Sterne standing on a wooden platform which he had positioned at the front of the Bristol. The engine cowling had been removed and the engine was completely exposed in the light of a couple of pressure lamps he had hung overhead.

He glanced over his shoulder and smiled. ‘Back so soon?’

‘Hannah took me to the local pub,’ I said. ‘I didn’t like the atmosphere.’

He turned and crouched down, a frown on his face. ‘What happened?’

I gave him the whole story including Figueiredo’s parting words. When I was finished, he sat there for a while, staring out into the rain. There was a sort of sadness on his face. No, more than that – worry. And there was a scar running from his right eye to the corner of his mouth. I’d failed to notice that earlier.

‘Poor Sam.’ He sighed. ‘So, we do what Figueiredo says. We go and get him in a little while.’ With an abrupt change in direction, he stood up and tapped the Bristol. ‘A superb engine, Rolls-Royce. Only the best. The Bristol was one of the greatest all-purpose planes on the Western Front.’

‘You were there?’

‘Oh, not what you are thinking. I wasn’t a Richthofen or a Udet in a skin-tight grey uniform with the blue Max at my throat, but I did visit the front-line Jagdstaffels fairly often. When I first started as an engineer, I worked for Fokker.’

‘And Hannah was on the other side of the line?’

‘I suppose so.’

He had returned to the engine, examining it carefully with a hand-lamp. ‘This is really in excellent condition.’

I said, ‘What’s wrong with him? Do you know?’

‘Sam?’ He shrugged. ‘It’s simple enough. He was too good too soon. Ace-of-aces at twenty-three. All the medals in the world – all the adulation.’ He leaned down for another spanner. ‘But for such a man, what happens when it is all over?’

I considered the point for a while. ‘I suppose in a way, the rest of his life would tend to be something of an anti-climax.’

‘An understatement as far as he is concerned. Twenty years of flying mail, of barnstorming, sky-diving to provide a momentary thrill for the mindless at state fairs who hope to see his parachute fail to open, of risking his life in a hundred different ways and at the end, what does he have to show for it?’ He swept his arms out in a gesture which took in everything. ‘This, my friend – this is all he has and three months from now, when hiis contract ends, a government bonus of five thousand dollars.’

He looked down at me for several seconds, then turned and went back to tinkering with the engine. I didn’t know what to say, but he solved the situation for me.

‘You know, I’m a great believer in hunches. I go by what I think of people, instantly, in the very first moment. Now you interest me. You are your own man, a rare thing in this day and age. Tell me about yourself.’

So I did for he was the easiest man to talk to I’d ever known. He spoke only briefly himself, the odd question thrown in casually now and then, yet at the end of things, he had squeezed me dry.

He said, ‘A good thing Sam was able to help you when he did, but then I’m also a great believer in fate. A man has to exist in the present moment. Accept what turns up. It’s impossible to live any other way. I have a book at the house which you should read. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.’

‘I have done,’ I said.

He turned, eyebrows raised in some surprise. ‘You agree with his general thesis?’

‘Not really. I don’t think anything in this life is certain enough for fixed rules to apply. You have to take what comes and do the best you can.’

‘Then Heidegger is your man. I have a book of his which would interest you in which he argues that for authentic living what is necessary is the resolute confrontation of death. Tell me, were you afraid yesterday when you were attempting to land that Vega of yours?’

‘Only afterwards.’ I grinned. ‘The rest of the time, I was too busy trying to hold the damned thing together.’

‘You and Heidegger would get on famously.’

‘And what would he think of Hannah?’

‘Not very much, I’m afraid. Sam exists in two worlds only. The past and the future. He has never succeded in coming to terms with the present. That is his tragedy.’

‘So what’s left for him?’

He turned and looked at me gravely, the spanner in his right hand dripping oil. ‘I only know one thing with certainty. He should have died in combat at the height of his career like so many others. At the last possible moment of the war. November 1918, for preference.’

It was a terrible thing to have to say and yet he meant it. I knew that. We stood staring at each other, the only sound the rain rushing into the ground. He wiped the oil from his hands with a piece of cotton waste and smiled sadly.

‘Now I think we had better go and get him while there is still time.’

I could hear the laughter from the hotel long before we got there and it was entirely the wrong sort. I knew then we were in for trouble and so did Mannie. His face beneath the old sou’wester he wore against the rain was very pale.

As we approached the hotel steps I said, ‘This man, Avila? What’s he like?’

He paused in the middle of the street. ‘There’s a story I’m fond of about an old Hassidic Rabbi who, having no money around the house, gave one of his wife’s rings to a beggar. When he told her what he’d done she went into hysterics because the ring was a family heirloom and very valuable. On hearing this, the Rabbi ran through the streets looking for the beggar.’

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