by Nigel Barley
Lauterbach furrowed his brow in concentration. “Oh indeed. The Queen of England, by the grace of God, has been delivered of a multiple birth – quintuplets I believe.”
“But that is extraordinary,” cried Rose. They both gulped, as in shock, and held out the glass for more, a patriotic toast.
“Is she not a lady advanced in years?” asked Privett, amazed.
“That is the wonder of it,” affirmed benign Lauterbach. “The children have been christened Pontoporos, Indus …”
Lauterbach suddenly felt an icy presence tickle the back of his neck, as of a ghostly manifestation and the eyes of his visitors grew wide, looking over his shoulder. Turning swiftly to see what this materialisation might be he found von Mueller, floating in one of his long coats.
“Enough news, I think, Mr Lauterbach, for our guests,” he whispered huskily. “But I see they are thirsty. Please see to their wants.”
It is often only when receiving guests that one becomes truly aware of the failings of one’s own home. The Emden was no longer the trim, white-scrubbed craft that had left Tsingtao just a few months earlier. She was streaked with corrosion, coal-grime and oil. The rails were bent and broken from the impact of coal sacks and old automobile tyres hung down her sides to shield her from collision with colliers. In more immaculate days, von Muecke had wanted the men to paint them white but such affectation was now a thing of the past. Weekly inspections had been reduced to a visit to the heads to declare them either ‘sweet’ or not. The scored deck gleamed with treacherous bare metal. Electrical wires were draped dangerously over handrails and now fishing-lines trailed through every porthole. As they sat in the bilious green wardroom, a chicken wandered in and looked at them, scratched at a hole in the lino and wandered out. A sailor walked past, whistling, with a duck tucked casually under his arm.
Von Mueller offered yet more scotch, thirstily accepted, while he gripped his own, as yet untouched and embarked on an epic tale of their part in friendly joint world manoeuvres by the navies of Britain, Germany and France. The appearance of the vessel must be forgiven. They had put down an armed uprising in German East Africa, been ordered without warning on a trip to the other side of the world, been damaged by a freak wave in a huge storm and come here for emergency repairs. They were suffering too from an accumulation of barnacles that had affected their speed and manoeuvrability. At the very least here, they hoped to flood underwater compartments of the vessel and so cant it to allow them to have their bottom scraped.
“Yes, yes,” cried Privett, misunderstanding, gesturing with ice-tinkling glass. “The ladies here are most obliging. They will do that for you for a few shillings.”
“Shut up fool.”
It was with deep regret that they arrived with no prior notice but the British vessels with which they co-operated had spoken so highly of the hospitality of the residents that they hoped they would be welcome.
“Ah yes. Co-operation.” Rose slurped whisky, sluicing it back and forth through huge yellow teeth like mouthwash. “Delighted to receive you I’m sure, but do you by any chance have a chap on board who knows about motorboats? Mine’s a sound enough old thing but the native mechanics have no sympathy for its little ways. You know what they say, ‘Give us the job and we’ll finish the tools’” He paused expectantly, awaiting laughter but von Mueller stared blankly. “Well, anyway, co-operation and all that …”
Von Mueller smiled with a shark’s smile that involved only his mouth. “Of course. As His Majesty’s representative, Mr Rose, it is hardly seemly that you conduct business from a rowing boat. Our machinist, Kluge, will attend you forthwith. Pray let me have you conducted back to your home in our own launch. Mr Lauterbach will attend to facilitate conversation.” He flashed a significant look. Lauterbach understood at once that his job was to frustrate all communication.
“Oh I say, most frightfully grateful.” Rose leapt to his feet, whisky slopping on crotch, teetered, overbalanced, put his hand to his head. Privett leapt up, canoned into him, spilt more on his lapel, was slapped angrily away.
“Damn and blast you.”
“Pushing. Always the pushing.” They swayed like two stage drunks.
“It is the canting of the vessel,” von Mueller smiled calmly. “Already they are tilting her over. This, I think, is what is troubling you. It is a matter of a few days only. A little more scotch will steady you. And then, Mr Lauterbach … if you please.”
Lauterbach swayed comfortably in his hammock, shaded by rustling palms, only one bare leg extending into sunlight, the better to appreciate the cool darkness of the rest. A cognac bottle nestled comfortably in the crook of his paunch, half full and providently corked. He had feasted on fresh fish, beach-baked in glossy banana leaf, and yam and cloudy palm toddy that tasted faintly of sheepdog. He had swallowed hot lobster and sea urchin and fruits that had no name in any European language. A cool wind, salted by a thousand miles of ocean, ruffled his hair and he thought fondly of the good, earthy sex he had also enjoyed the night before, betokened by the slight satisfied bruising of groin and thigh. Sex with a new race was always the most satisfactory. It was not the thrill of forbidden fruit, more the fact that – despite his cultivatedly bad memory for partners – he found that, with increasing age, the world was gradually filling up with faces that reminded him of other faces, faces that were quite inappropriate to sexual excitements. A girl in a Shanghai bar had recalled inopportunely and disastrously his grinning Foochow steward, Ah Ping. Whilst engaged in recent play with a Russian countess and studying the back of her neck, he had remembered absently the coiled hair of his great aunt as she sat before him in church, when he was a child. Hopeless. Even one of the more approachable ladies here had suddenly seemed to have von Mueller’s purposeful nose and mouth. Unthinkable.
Over the other side of the paradisal lagoon, the men, sexually unshriven, were earning their bread in the sweat of their brows, in the hot sun, heads under knotted handkerchiefs, scraping, scrubbing and repainting such parts of their capsized mistress, the Emden, as were made available to their attentions. With the exhaustion of regulation navy off-white, a range of different shades had been produced by mixing together all remaining paint dregs on the vessel, so that the former swan now looked like a thing of patchwork. Lauterbach lay back and smiled and yawned. Newly emptied and filled, he loved to watch others work. It relaxed him.
He had gone over the top, he now saw, with his invention of news to satisfy Rose and Privett. The diminutive Japanese cricket eleven, none over four foot six, currently touring Great Britain and defeating all comers including the MCC, had been a step too far. Rose had bristled with disbelief. Similarly, the French Academy’s decree announcing the complete abolition of adjective endings in the French tongue throughout the empire in the interests of wartime economy had been ill-judged and rankled with Privett. Never mind. These had been smoothed over with the gift of a case of scotch and the repair of the motor launch, an antique thing of polished wood and brass more suited to Thamesside regattas than the Pacific Ocean. Rose and Privett had chugged off on a long overdue visit to the other side of the island, visibly still drunk, voices bickering above the soft putter of the recalibrated engine. “Do not push. Always you push.” They remained ignorant of the outbreak of hostilities and this fact had somehow irked von Muecke who felt dishonoured by it and took it out on the men. But then von Muecke believed that wars happened for a reason. Lauterbach, on the other hand, knew they just happened, with all the lack of purpose and indifferent inevitability of earthquakes. The thing to do was keep your head down and wait for them to blow over.
There was an itch around his little toe, that one out there in the sun. Probably a mosquito bite. There was always a serpent in paradise. Perhaps he would scratch it later but it was, for the moment, simply too far. He yawned again, smiled and dropped into a contented doze.
Chapter Four
Lauterbach was by now used to three cheers from departing crews, as they headed back to freedom, wi
th all their personal effects intact, and a tale of adventure to tell. But it was something of a surprise to be cheered while boarding a British vessel for the first time. The Ponrabbel was a dredger, small, ugly, a real pig of a ship, shoving its snout into the high waves and wallowing in the deep troughs with a nasty sideways shaking of the tail. The crew were there, grinning, lined up on deck with their bags ready packed and the captain stepping forward with a blushing handshake.
“Come right aboard you is it?”
She was built for harbour work in sheltered water and they were bound from Cardiff for Tasmania at a top speed of four knots. Every one of them had been seasick most of the time and they expected her to turn turtle at any moment. This was their second attempt to drive their pig to market and they were four months into it. The first vessel had gone down under them in a storm and this time they had prudently negotiated payment in advance and were not in the least averse to seeing this loathed ship go to the bottom as the Emden used her for target practice.
“You wouldn’t let me have just one shot at her I suppose? No? Thought not.”
The British crew watched and cheered as the hated dredger turned over, pointed its red bottom rudely at them and disappeared with a slurping noise. They settled cosily into the Buresk and luxuriated in the unaccustomed fags and booze stripped from other, larger prizes. Several more ships went down over the next few days for, in an attempt to frustrate them, the allied shipping routes had been conveniently shifted to precisely where they now were and British vessels virtually queued up to be sunk. Then they stopped the Troilus, a Blue Funnel liner, packed with strategic metals, rubber – and passengers.
“Hallo, Julius.” A small woman, short hair, mid-forties, fashionably dressed in a manner somewhat too young for her years. “I’m sure you remember me … that night on the Kraetke.”
“Er …” He looked round wildly. None of the crew were within earshot.
“Oh. Don’t worry. My husband’s not here, busy dumping the brats at school in Shangers and making more money in Singers. Rodney only earns, never seems to get time to spend … I’ve been off in Honkers and Rangers and now I’m here.” She smiled and preened. “I’ve never been ravished by a pirate … before.”
“Er …” Neat body. A mouth used to laughter. Nice condition for her age. In peacetime she would have been nothing special but now, with the war, the world was on sexual short rations. She was not, even on closer examination, just some rancid old tuna boat. Mmm.
“This is the third time you’ve blocked my passage, you naughty boy. Every time I get on a ship, they make us get off it again because the Emden’s been up to its old tricks.” She fiddled with a diamond brooch pinned over her right breast. “I was lucky with the Troilus, brand new … maiden voyage.” She lit a Black Cat, blew and flicked the match. Very bold that. She was poised and assured. Clearly a total bitch. “They say your commander’s quite dishy. Where is he?” She sucked on the cigarette – blatant red lipstick circled the stub – and threw back her head, exhaling hot smoke and showing to advantage the line of her throat. Too much gold gleamed a trifle indiscreetly at neck and ear. There was a pale line on her finger where a ring, normally worn, had just been removed. She flashed him the smile with which Eve beguiled Adam and the serpent rose within him.
“What? Who? Von Mueller? No, no. Small, ugly, totally bald. Anyway a monk.” Who the hell was she? Had he already boarded her on the Shanghai run? She pirouetted and her skirt flounced up as if by chance. Good legs. Peach silk shift flapped against her calves. Action stations trumpeted in his brain. Eyes goggled. She patted coquettishly at his arm and pouted little-girlishly. “So what are you going to do with me, captain,” she gasped huskily. “Make me walk your beastly long plank?”
That was it. Any more whispering and she’d begin to remind him of cock-crinkling von Mueller. Lauterbach ran up the battle flag and rang up full speed ahead. He smirked cheesily and offered a gallantly crooked elbow. “Perhaps, madam, at the risk of bringing comfort to an enemy, you would honour me by having a little drink in my cabin before we part? For old times sake.”
She slid her hand confidently into it and squeezed. “Oh how kind. And then, perhaps you might take me on a tour of the less public parts of your vessel, what you might call your private parts. I should just adore to have a look at your torpedo tubes …”
Ah. So he had … “Lieutenant Fikentscher,” he beckoned the young man across. “My compliments to Lieutenant von Muecke. Please report that I am obliged to remain on duty here this evening to ensure the security of this prize and take an inventory of her cargo.” His ordinance was primed and ready to fire. He had the range. Now where the hell was the captain’s cabin on this ship?
Lauterbach stood stark naked and ready-soaped staring at von Mueller’s silhouette up in the wheelhouse. The captain sat tightly buttoned in his baking deckchair, shuffling manifests, maps, shipping-lists, marking, penciling and tutting- the world reduced to a manageable thing of paper. Pigeons preened and cooed in a loft attached to the masthead and tethered cattle examined in puzzlement the green anti-slip paint of the prow as if it were some new and unsatisfactory kind of grass. But von Mueller ignored them and stared purposefully out ahead, deliberately unaware that around him was not a ship of fools but of nudists. A mood of truancy had descended over the vessel.
To the left of Lauterbach, burly, tattooed stokers disrobed and displayed hirsutely on the forecastle, while Two, Three and Four cowered coyly behind a sheeted screen on the afterdeck that reduced them to a public display of bony ankles. Apart from von Muecke, who was on duty on the bridge, all the other officers congregated in bashful nakedness on the poop, gripping Elysium soap before their privities. Lauterbach was sure that von Muecke considered physical processes a military inefficiency while to von Mueller they were simply vulgar.
Von Muecke’s job was to chase the tropical thunderbursts so that the men could refill the tanks of drinking water and benefit from the rare treat of a fresh shower. Salt water dried and cracked the skin. Over time, seeping wounds like chilblains formed under the armpits and festered between the shoulders and toes. Heels gaped with raw flesh. Boils nested and suppurated between the buttocks. Lauterbach posed in the posture of a classical statue against the sun, an unplinthed satyr amongst hairless fauns, big-bellied and shameless, a thing to frighten schoolgirls in a herbaceous border. Fikentscher nudged von Guerard.
“So it’s true about the Lauterbach torpedo,” he whispered in awe, nodding. Dr Schwabe, ears ever-pricked for innuendo, edged closer, fumbling at his left nipple for the pencil he usually kept- in his top pocket, peered through his glasses against the lens-flashing glare. “Mein Gott!” There was a Freudian crash of thunder and sudden warm, clean rainwater hosed down on their gasping, searing skins like a blessing. Salt water formed no lather but this rain gushed instant white foam. They cheered and frotted and groaned and danced on the spot orgiastically, desperately washing, afraid that they would emerge from the cloud’s rainshadow before they could rinse. But this was a good downpour not one that left you soaped and sticky. Time to wash the hair, to let the sweet rain slosh down your face and into your mouth, to grow chill and shiver and rush laughing and towelling for shelter. They wrapped themselves in bathrobes, filched from their twenty-two victims, emblazoned with names such as Diplomat, King Lud, and Clan Grant and played rough boyish games of tag in blood heated by the burden of seed that had gone too long unspilled, undischarged lightning looking for any rod. Von Guerard laughed and danced in the outpouring of a benevolent Nature, his eyes sparkling with pure joy. But Lauterbach, classically clad in white towelette Troilus, was not laughing. He contemplated them with unsolaced sadness as he wrung grey water from his pubes. Earlier they had deliberately steered away from any new prey they sighted. He had been told to set a southerly course towards the Island of Penang, off the coast of Malaya. The shower, the change of clothes. It was standard preparation for battle and meant some of them were about to die. For him the stench of
death overpowered even the thick and sickly perfume of Elysium brand toilet soap.
At two in the morning, there was no sound except the regular thwack of waves against the bow and the acidic hiss as seawater dissolved into foam. They were alone, the colliers Buresk and the more recently captured Exford were elsewhere, steaming slowly towards the next rendezvous.
“Lighthouse sighted, sir.”
The men were still burping over their morning meal of milk soup, followed by ghastly British tinned sausages and Indian coffee but wide awake. Von Mueller scanned the horizon through British naval glasses.
“Rig the fourth funnel, Number One.”
Lauterbach was sweating. Damn von Mueller and his military ambition. Merchant vessels were too easy for him, he had to go after warships, into the lion’s den armed with nothing but a peashooter. This was not a repeat of Madras, a civilian port with its broad seafront. Lauterbach, feigning enthusiasm, had examined the chart of Penang harbour earlier that night. This was a military base built for defence. The entrance was a narrow tube from the north. The southern exit was too shallow for them so they would have to make a tight turn to escape back up it. Officially there were no modern fortifications but it still looked like a deathtrap, a narrow throat to get stuck in like a fishbone. There would be heavy warships in there with good thick armour they could not hope to hurt with their own small bore weapons. Only a torpedo would do and that could only be relied upon at close range. They would be like, like … a duck quacked from the menagerie outside, neatly providing the image Lauterbach was searching for.
At 4.30 the men were called to attention and the speed increased to 18 knots as they ran for the inner harbour, ignoring the waiting pilot boat. Like Madras, the whole port was all lit up invitingly. The first dawn light probed the horizon. Somewhere on shore a bird sang with heart-wrenching beauty and then suddenly there was a huge target right in front of them, crisp in morning light. Von Muecke was furiously thumbing through a book of naval silhouettes, hissing excitedly through his teeth.