Free The Mercenaries by John Harris

Kowalski had given him, but it turned out to be a brothel where there were plush red sofas, gilt mirrors and a sleazy Russian blonde, her skin dusted with white powder so that her flesh looked faintly greenish, who insisted Fagan owed her twenty dollars.
    ‘ ‘Twas the bullet I got at Balaclava,’ Fagan said as they fought to get him past the blonde and into the taxi. ‘It was jumpin’ in the wound and I needed a drink to take away the pain. Don’t let Ellie see me, bhoys. She’ll wipe the floor with me if she finds out.’
    As they reached the hotel and appeared on the landing upstairs from the grilled lift the porters used, the furious, affronted Ellie was waiting for them in the doorway of her room, her eyes glittering, her mouth a tight line.
    ‘O.K.,’ she said between gritted teeth. ‘Go ahead, get him inside and I’ll crack his skull with the bed leg.’
    The confrontation ended in a farcical scene on the landing with Fagan swaying in large trembling dignity in front of her, his face twisted into a sad clown’s grin that was meant to express understanding and love. Its only effect was to make her drag his gun out of his luggage and threaten to shoot him with it.
    ‘I ought to put a slug in you, you treacherous, stinking, whoring son-of-a-bitch,’ she snapped.
    ‘ ‘Twouldn’t be worth it,’ he said. ‘She had none of the unparalleled virtuosity at the game I’ve come to expect from you.’
    His attempt at humour burst in his face as Ellie immediately exploded into a rage again, storming up and down the corridor, swinging the enormous Colt while he grinned his death’s head grin at her and the giggling waiters and the floor-boys and the liftman all looked on from the stairs..
    The following morning, though Fagan didn’t appear, Ellie was waiting in the hotel lobby for the car that took them to the airfield, as though nothing had happened. Her face was expressionless and her lips tight, and she sat huddled in her old leather coat, obviously not intending to make or receive comments on what had happened. It had very early become clear that she and Fagan had never legalised their marriage before a priest or a registrar, but, though Fagan didn’t hesitate to throw out hints about their relationship, Ellie hugged it to herself as though she had had long since regretted it and had no intention of sharing her secret with anyone.
    ‘One thing,’ Sammy observed grudgingly. ‘She doesn’t let you down.’
    The work proceeded slowly and laboriously, with Fagan always more a hindrance than a help, though Ellie, when she wasn’t occupied in handling him, took the indifferent conditions in her stride. Like everyone else, she was caught by Sammy’s infectious enthusiasm and was well used to eating al fresco meals in tents.
    ‘I’m the original outdoor girl,’ she pointed out. ‘I’ve been doing this since I left the cradle and I guess I’ve not lived in a house for more than a coupla months in my whole life.’
    With her taut-spring manner, it was hard to imagine her being feminine enough to cry, but, after raised voices in the room along the corridor where she and Fagan conducted their eternal warring, they often heard her, sharp and incisive above Fagan’s wheedling, suddenly collapse into unexpected sobbing.
    She never let them see her weakness, however, as though she had long since sworn to herself never to expect sympathy, and she was always crisp and efficient in everything she did at the field. And she never refused any task, however dirty, though one of her more startling habits, in spite of the indifferent weather and the cool breeze and the stares of the coolies, was to strip to the waist after work in the evening to wash the oil off.
    ‘She’s a nut,’ Sammy commented, staring over the engine compartment of the Albatros to where she was towelling her lean body by the tent. ‘They’re both nuts. It’s a wonder they didn’t all kill themselves in South Africa. They’ve been runnin’