‘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.