The Last Place God Made - Jack Higgins [56]
Which was honest enough, God knows, but too honest for me. I said, 'You can keep the cigarette,' and moved out into the darkness.
I paused some little distance away and glanced back. She stood there in the doorway, silhouetted against the light, the outline of her body clear through the thin material of the housecoat. I was filled with the most damnable ache imaginable, but for what I could not be certain. Perhaps for something which had never existed in the first place?
I heard Hannah call her name faintly, she turned and closed the door. I felt a kind of release, standing there in the rain. One thing was for certain - it was the end of something.
There was news when I returned to the hangar, word over the radio that Alberto had been ordered to evacuate Santa Helena forthwith and was to pull out the following day. It touched me in no way at all, meant absolutely nothing. I ignored Mannie's troubled glances and lay in my hammock staring up at the hangar roof for the rest of the night.
I suppose it would be easy to say with hindsight that some instinct warned me that I stood on the edge of events, but certainly I was aware that something was wrong and waited, filled with a vague unease, anticipating that what was to come was not pleasant.
There was no sign of Hannah when I left at nine the following morning for Manaus on the mail run. I was tired, too tired for that game, eyes gritty from lack of sleeep and I had a hard day ahead. Not only the Manaus run, but two contract trips down-river.
Under the circumstances, I'd taken the Hayley, but the military evacuation from Santa Helena made it more than likely that Hannah would be required up there when they managed to get him out of her bed.
I made the mail drop, re-fuelled and was off again with machine parts which were needed in a hurry by one of the mining companies a hundred and fifty miles down-river and a Portuguese engineer to go with them. He wasn't at all certain about the Bristol, but I got him there in one piece and was on my way back within the hour with ore samples for the assaye officer in Manaus.
My second trip was nothing like as strenuous, a seventy-mile hop with medical supplies to a Jesuit Mission and another quick turn-about, to the great disappointment of the priest in charge, a Dutchman called Herzog who had hoped for a chess game or two and some conversation.
All in all, a rough day and it was about six o'clock in the evening when I landed again at Manaus. A couple of mechanics were waiting and I helped them get the Bristol under cover.
The de Havilland Rapide I'd noticed a day or so earlier, was parked by the end hangar again. A nice plane and as reliable as you could wish so I'd been told. The legend Johnson Air Transport was neatly stencilled under the cabin windows.
One of the mechanics ran me into town in the old Crossley tender again. I dozed off in the cab and had to be awakened when we reached the Palace. Hardly surprising, when you consider that I hadn't slept at all the previous night.
I wanted a drink badly. I also needed about twelve hours in bed. I hesitated by the reception desk, considering the matter. The need for a very large brandy won hands down and I went into the bar. If I hadn't, things might have turned out very differently, but then, most of life, or what it becomes, depends upon such turns.
A small, wiry man in flying boots and leather jacket sat on the end stool constructing a tower of toothpicks on the base of an upturned glass. There was no barman as usual. I dropped my grip on the floor, went behind the counter and found a bottle of Courvoisier.
His left eye was fixed for all time, a reasonable facsimile of the real thing in glass. The face was expressionless, a wax-like film of scar tissues, and when he spoke the mouth didn't seem to move at all.
'Jack Johnson,' he said in a hard Australian twang. 'Not that I'm any bloody punch-up artist like the black fella.'
I held up the brandy bottle, he nodded and I reached for another glass. 'That your Rapide up on the field?'
'That's it, sport, Johnson Air Transport.