The Steel Tsar (7 page)

Hira could add little about the opium eater. “All I know is that he was in better condition when he arrived than he is now. I don’t have much to do with the European community, as you may have noticed.” He looked sardonically at me. “Englishmen often start acting strangely when they’ve been out East a few years. Maybe they feel guilty about exploiting us, eh?”

I refused to rise to this and we completed our meal in relative silence.

After dinner we sat back in our chairs and smoked, discussing the health of the coolie I had found. Hira told me he was recovering reasonably quickly. I was just about to go up to bed when the door opened suddenly and a nun rushed into Hira’s room. “Doctor—quickly—it is Underwood!” Her face was full of anxiety. “He has been attacked. I think he is dying.”

We hurried downstairs to the little entrance hall of the hospital. In the light from the oil lamp I saw Olmeijer and Nye standing there. Their faces were pale and tense and they were staring helplessly down at something which lay on an improvised stretcher they had placed on the floor. They must have carried it all the way from the hotel.

Hira crouched down and inspected the man on the stretcher. “My God!” he said.

Nye addressed me. “He was dumped on the steps of the hotel about an hour ago. I think some Chinaman objected to his wife or maybe his daughter running off with Underwood. I don’t know.” Grimly he wiped his face with his handkerchief. “This couldn’t have happened before the bloody war...”

I gagged as I got a good look at the battered mess of flesh on the stretcher. “Poor devil!”

Hira straightened up and looked significantly at me. There was no hope for Underwood. He turned to Nye and Olmeijer. “Can you take the stretcher up to the ward, please?”

I followed as the two men picked up the stretcher and staggered as they climbed the short flight of steps to the ward. With the nurses, I helped get him onto the bed, but it was plain that virtually every bone in his body had been broken. He was scarcely recognizable as a human being. They had taken their time in beating him up and he couldn’t last long.

Hira began to fill a hypodermic. The beaten man’s eyes opened and he saw us. His lips moved.

I bent to listen.

“Bloody Chinks... bloody woman... done for me. Found us in the mine... The sheets... Oh, God... The bloody clubs...”

Hira gave him a hefty injection. “Cocaine,” he said to me. “It’s about all we have now.”

I looked at the next bed and saw the coolie I had rescued staring at Underwood with an expression of quiet satisfaction.

“This couldn’t be some sort of retaliation, could it?” I asked Hira.

“Who knows?” Hira looked down at the Australian as the man’s eyes glazed and closed again.

Nye put his fist to his lips and cleared his throat. “I wonder if somebody ought to tell Nesbit...” He looked at Underwood and pursed his lips. “There’ll be hell to pay when Begg hears about this.”

Hira seemed almost amused. “It could mean the end.”

Thoughtfully, Olmeijer rubbed at his neck. “Need Begg be told?”

“The man has been attacked,” I said. “A couple of hours or so and it will be murder. He can’t last the night.”

“If Begg goes on the rampage, old boy, we all stand a chance of being murdered,” Nye pointed out. “Begg will anger the Malays and Chinese so much they’re bound to turn on us. These aren’t the old days. What do you think a dozen bloody Ghoorkas can do against a thousand coolies?”

There was a glint of malice in Hira’s eyes. “So you don’t want me to report this to the Official Representative, gentlemen?”

“Better not,” said Nye. “We’ll all keep mum, eh?”

I watched the nurse cleaning the blood from Underwood’s body. The cocaine had knocked him out completely. I walked to the door of the ward and lit a cigarette, watching the mosquitoes and the moths fluttering around the oil lamp in the lobby. From beyond the open door came the sound of the sea striking the stones of the quay. It no longer seemed peaceful. Instead the silence had become ominous. As the other three men joined me I inclined my head.

“Very well,” I said. “I’ll say nothing.”

* * *

N
ext morning New Birmingham was deathly quiet. I walked through empty streets. I felt I was watched by a thousand pairs of eyes as I made my way up to the airpark.

I did not call in at the hotel. There was no point now in hoping to see Underwood there. He had died in the night at the hospital. I carried on past it and stood by one of the ruined hovergyros, kicking at a broken rotor which lay on the weed-grown concrete beside the machine. From the forest behind me came the sounds of dawn. At this hour some of the nocturnal animals were still about and the diurnal inhabitants were beginning to wake. Hornbills, cockatoos, fairy bluebirds and doves fluttered among the trees, filling the air with song and with colour. They seemed to be celebrating something, perhaps the end of the human occupation of the island. The air was rich with the stink of the forest, of animal spoor and rotting tree trunks. I heard the chatter of gibbons and saw tiny shrews skipping along branches heavy with dew. On the wall of the hangar the beady eyes of lizards regarded me coldly as if I had no business to be there.

I turned towards what had been the main control building where the murdered man had locked up his wireless apparatus before going off on what was to prove his final orgy.

The whole building had been sealed before the airship personnel had left. The windows on all three storeys had been covered by steel shutters and it would take special tools and a lot of hard work to get even one of them down. All the doors were locked and barred and I could see where various attempts to open them had failed.

I walked round and round the concrete building, pushing uselessly at the shutters and rattling the handles of the doors. The chirring sounds from the forest seemed to mock my helplessness and at length I stopped by a door which had evidently been in recent use, tried the handle once more, then leaned against the frame, looking back across the deserted park, with its broken bones of flying machines and its rusting mast, at the spruce hotel beyond. The sun glinted on Olmeijer’s gilded sign: ROYAL AIRPARK HOTEL, it said, THE ISLAND’S BEST.

A little later someone came out through the French windows leading from the bar and stood on the verandah. Then they saw me and began to walk slowly through the tall grass towards me.

I recognized the figure and I frowned. What could he want?

I
t was Dempsey. of course. He had shaved and put on a suit slightly cleaner than the one he had worn on the previous day, but he wore the same tattered native shirt underneath it. By the pupils of his eyes I saw he had not yet had his first pipe of opium.

He shuffled towards me, coughing on the comparatively cold air of the early morning. “I heard about Underwood,” he said. He crossed the cracked concrete and stood looking at me.

I offered him a cigarette which he accepted, fumbling it from my case and trembling slightly as I lit it for him.

“You knew the Chinese were after Underwood, didn’t you?” I said. “That’s what you meant yesterday when you said a lot of people were looking for him.”

“Yesterday? I don’t remember.” He puffed on the cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs.

“You might have saved him, Dempsey, if you’d warned someone at the time.”

He straightened up a little and he seemed amused as he glanced towards the forest. “On the other hand I might have done everyone else more harm. It’s a bit of a luxury, a social conscience, isn’t it, Bastable?” He felt in his pocket. “I came to give you this. I found it on the steps.” He held out a Yale key. “Must have fallen from Underwood’s pocket when they dumped him.”

I hesitated before accepting the key. Then I turned and tried it in the lock. The wards clicked back and the door swung open. The interior smelled of stale liquor and burnt rubber.

“All that’s left of Underwood is his stink,” said Dempsey. “Now you’re going to try to wireless for help, I suppose.”

“I’ll try,” I said. “If I can get through to Darwin I’ll ask them to reroute the first available airship to pick me up—and anyone else who wants to leave the island.”

“Better tell them it’s an emergency.” Dempsey waved his hand in the general direction of the town. “Make no bones about it. There are half a dozen excuses for an uprising now. Begg finding out about Underwood will be just one more. The Chinese are in a mood to slaughter all the Malays and if the whites interfere, they’ll probably get together and kill us first. It’s true.” A ghost of a smile appeared on his lips. “I know. I’m in rather closer touch with the natives than most, after all. Underwood was just a beginning.”

I nodded. “All right. I’ll tell Darwin.”

“You know how to work the wireless?”

“I’ve had some training...”

Dempsey followed me into the gloomy interior of the office. It was a filthy litter of empty beer cans, bottles and bits of broken wireless equipment. He pulled back the shutters and light came through the dusty windows. I saw what could only be the wireless set in one corner and I picked my way across the floor towards it.

Dempsey showed me the pedals underneath the bench. I sat down and put my feet on them. They turned slowly at first and then more easily.

Dempsey inspected the set. “Seems to be warming up,” he said. He began to fiddle with the dials. There was a faint crackle from the phones. He picked them up and listened, shaking his head. “Valve trouble, probably. You’d better let me have a go.”

I rose and Dempsey sat down in the chair. After a while he found a screwdriver and took part of the casing off the set. “It’s the valves, all right,” he said. “There should be a box of spares behind you on the other bench. Could you bring it over?”

I found the box and placed it beside him as he continued to work.

“Did you learn about radios on airships?” I asked him.

He tightened his mouth and went on with the job.

“How did you happen to turn up here?” I said, my curiosity overcoming my tact.

“None of your bloody business, Bastable. There, that should do it.” He screwed in the last valve and began pedaling, but then he fell back in the chair coughing. “Too bloody weak,” he said. “You’d better do the pumping, if you wouldn’t mind...” He lapsed into another fit of coughing as he got up and I replaced him.

While I pedaled, he twisted the dials again until we heard a faint voice coming through the earphones. Dempsey settled the headset over his ears and adjusted the microphone. “Hello, Darwin. This is Rowe Island. Over.” He turned a knob.

He flipped a toggle switch and spoke impatiently into the mike. “No, I’m sorry, I don’t know our bloody call sign. Our operator’s been killed as a matter of fact. No, we’re not a military base. This is Rowe Island in the Indian Ocean and the civilian population is in danger.”

While I continued to pedal the generator, Dempsey told Darwin our situation. There was some confusion, a wait of nearly twenty minutes while the operator checked with his superiors, some more confusion over the location of the island and then at last Dempsey leaned back and sighed. “Thank you, Darwin.”

As he stripped off the headset he glanced down at me. “You’re lucky. They’ll have one of their patrol ships over here in a day or two—if it hasn’t been shot down. You’d better tell the others to pack their bags and be ready.”

“I’m very grateful, Dempsey,” I said. “I don’t think I’d have had a chance of getting through if it hadn’t been for you.”

The problems with the wireless had exhausted him. He got up and began to rummage around in the office until he found an almost full bottle of rum. He opened it, took a long drink, then offered it to me.

I accepted the bottle and sipped the rum, gasping. It was raw stuff. I handed it back and watched with a certain amount of respect as he finished it.

We left the office and began to walk across the airpark. As we approached the mast he paused and looked up through the girders. The passenger lift was at the top of the mast, presumably left there by the last hasty group to go aboard the ship when it had taken the bulk of the Europeans off the island. “This won’t be any good,” he said. “Nobody to work it, even if it was in decent condition. The ship will have to come right down. It’s going to be a problem. Everybody will have to muck in.”

“Will you help me?”

“If I’m conscious.”

“I heard you commanded an airship once,” I said.

Then I regretted my curiosity for a peculiar look of pained amusement came over his face. “Yes. Yes, I did. For a very short time.”

I dropped it. “Let me get you a drink,” I said.

* * *

O
lmeijer was in his usual spot at the bar, reading his book. Nye was not there. The Dutchman looked up and nodded to us. He made no mention of the previous night’s business and I didn’t bring it up. I told him that we had managed to get through to Darwin and that they were sending an airship. He seemed unimpressed. I think he enjoyed his role as the last hotelier on the island. He would rather have customers who couldn’t pay than no customers at all. Dempsey and I took our drinks to one of the tables near the window.

“You’ve been a great help, Dempsey,” I said.

Cynically he stared at me over the rim of his glass. “Am I helping? I may be doing you a disservice. Do you really want to go back to all that?”

“I think it’s my duty.”

“Duty? To support the last vestiges of a discredited imperialism?”

It was the first time I had heard him utter anything like a political opinion. I was surprised. He sounded like a bit of a Red, I thought. I could think of no answer which wouldn’t have been impolite.

He downed the rest of his scotch and stared out over the airpark, speaking as if to himself. “It’s all a question of power and rarely a question of justice.” He looked sharply at me. “Don’t patronize me, Bastable. I don’t need your kindness, thanks. If you knew...” He broke off. “Another?”

I watched Dempsey walk unsteadily to the bar and then get fresh drinks. He brought them back almost reluctantly.