The Last Place God Made. Jack Higgins
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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?’