Free The Mercenaries by John Harris Page B

group of red-blooded young people with money to burn and an excited willingness to explore, there was plenty to do in Shanghai just across the river, without having to rely on the business and diplomatic circles of the International Settlement. In spite of the Sikh policemen and the ferociously efficient Customs Service, the city was alive with touts, pimps, white slavers, thieves, smugglers and pick-pockets, with a great deal of graft and corruption in the hands of White Russian refugees from the Bolshevik revolution who were prepared for a price to provide anything from a car to a woman.
    Every morning the newspapers carried some new sensation, whether it was murder, gang rivalry, opium smuggling or the sacking of some town up-country in the interminable civil war inland. Every evening there were eager girls--some of them even from the staid homes along the Bubbling Well Road, who were bored with cocktails and the eternal dinner and tennis parties, and found fliers more exciting than stockbrokers--and Ira and Sammy rarely got back to their hotel before the early hours of the morning.
    Sometimes Fagan was with them in their search for somewhere to spend their money, and sometimes even Ellie, chatting professionally about aeroplanes in her crisp businesslike way with Sammy. Fagan seemed to have discovered all the noisiest, most scandalous dives in Shanghai, and had a gift--when he wasn’t in the doom-laden mood that set Ellie’s nerves on edge--of turning even the simplest meal into a celebration. He was always picking up European or Chinese girls for the unattached Ira and Sammy, whom he seemed to feel were missing something from life without anyone to share their beds, and there were wild parties and difficult moments in the early hours of the morning, and more than a few tears and high words at bedroom doors.
    He seemed to regard the boyish Sammy as the ideal butt for his jokes.
    ‘I don’t want your bloody women!’ Sammy was finally driven to yell at him after he had spent half an hour shoving two Chinese girls into Sammy’s room as fast as Sammy had shoved them out.
    Fagan hooted with laughter. ‘Why?’ he demanded. ‘You got one already?’
    ‘No.’ Sammy glared. ‘I haven’t.’
    ‘Maybe you prefer boys?’
    His face furious, Sammy leapt across the bed, his fists swinging, and the two of them rolled on the floor in the corridor, with the two Chinese girls screaming for help at the top of the stairs.
    Ira separated them with difficulty and pushed Fagan into his own room, doubled up with mirth. For Sammy, however, it was no laughing matter.
    ‘One of these days,’ he said cryptically, ‘that bleddy lunatic’s going to die of one of his own jokes.’
     
    In spite of Fagan and the willing girls, they managed to remain uninvolved, even if heavily engaged, and for all the late nights, even managed to put in a great deal of work. Within a week they had the Fokker reassembled and airworthy, with Sammy lying over the engine compartment and Ira in the cockpit, the propeller turning at low revs while a couple of coolies draped themselves over the tail. Sammy’s head was cocked as he studied the tappets and listened to the ticks and clicks behind the firing of the cylinders, his thin sensitive craftsman’s face alight with pleasure. Ira watched him with pride because Sammy’s skill was his own, accepted greedily and already improved upon. He felt warmer towards Sammy than anyone else in the world. Together they seemed already to have been through a lifetime not only of disasters and disappointments but also of hectic affairs and noisy parties, and Sammy, with his thin body and beaky face, the absolute antithesis of Ira’s stocky bulk, was nearer to him, he decided, than his own family had ever been.
    Sammy caught his eye and smiled back, an affectionate, genuine smile that was full of gaiety and natural human warmth. ‘She’s O.K.,’ he shouted as Ira closed the throttle. These B.M.W.’s are beauts. They