by Nigel Barley
“How’s the price?” It was the other unchanging subject, a universal greeting for merchants and administrators alike. The fortunes of everyone in the club rode more or less directly on the rocky price of rubber and the price of rubber depended on the war in the wider world which was beyond their control. The corner of Potter’s mouth turned down. He was fat, unlined, like a great soft-fleshed baby.
“Not so good. The Brits have just brought in another twenty thousand acres of plantation in Malaya. We can’t compete with their quality for the Australian factories.”
He reached, gulped gin, swilled it round as if to cure toothache, did not belch. Lauterbach scowled sympathy. A boy pattered over and smiled. ”Tuan?”
“Satu Bintang besar.”
He bowed and slithered away deftly to fetch beer. Potter swigged dutifully.
“Learning a bit of the lingo, I see. No harm in that. It’s all this talk of Holland entering the war on the British side, makes people nervous. If they do, we lose the German war market and what will become of us?”
“What will become of Germany?”
“That too.” But said, Lauterbach noted, without much conviction. Moreover, Germany was a large mass of rock and soil that would always survive but, if Holland entered the war, what would become of poor fragile Lauterbach dangling at the end of a British rope? He felt gloom descend on him and gloom, for him, was more usually a thing of the small, morning hours. An elegant, pared figure slid into the chair beside him, ordering drink nautically with both hands, at long distance, in sign language, and dug in a heavy leather document case.
“Herr Lauterbach. Herr Potter.”
“Hallo Kessel.” Lauterbach flashed him a smile of genuine warmth.
Kessel extended a sheaf of crisp documents with the letterhead of the German Ministry of Supply. “Sorry to keep you waiting Mr Potter. I hope I haven’t delayed you too long. Paperwork always takes longer than you expect. The permits for the next shipment from the embassy. Payment on the usual terms.”
Potter grimaced and stuffed them all crumpled in his breast pocket. “Thank God for one steady customer. Been busy?”
Kessel pouted, accepted a beer from a boy and slurped through the pout.
“Busy, busy,” he sighed. “H.E. who must be obeyed has got a bee in his bonnet about unrestricted submarine warfare. The Crown Prince – God bless him – has been making speeches in America again and put everyone’s back up. Their newspapers are full of it. So muggins has to do a position paper that has to be sent off to Berlin by tonight. Otherwise they won’t be able to start sinking neutral vessels on Monday.”
Potter gaped and staggered heavy-gutted to his feet, reached down to the table for his glass and drained it. Lauterbach could not keep his eyes off Potter’s stomach. On himself such a paunch would contain at least ten thousand dollars. Unrestricted talk of unrestricted submarine warfare upset Potter perhaps, made him a party to things he did not wish to know, smacked a little too much of collaboration. The British authorities were said to be getting interested in such things and he couldn’t get out of the room fast enough.
“Thanks for the papers, Herr Kessel. Sorry I can’t stay. Got to go and get back to the plantation. Got to keep at them. The minute my back’s turned the lazy sods all sling their hammocks and go to sleep till they hear the sound of the car coming back up the road.”
“Quite so. It is the same at the embassy. I keep a hammock there myself. Good journey back to Probolingo. Keep the rubber flowing.” Kessel smiled coolly. The old white man tottered wearily away on flushed and chubby legs.
Kessel arranged his cuffs. And so to business. “I shouldn’t taunt him I know but I just can’t seem to resist it. It tickles my fancy and – as you know – I have a highly ticklable fancy. It is nice to have the English working for us, in a manner of speaking, and for those of us attuned to an ironic resonance the war provides some deeply affecting moments. A wonderful thing commercial neutrality, Juli-bumm, but not for the likes of you and me. I am a faithful servant of the state and you are – let me see – a war hero.”
“Perhaps so, perhaps not.” Lauterbach liked Kessel, a man with a lightness of touch and an elegant sense of detachment, a taste for sheer deliberate badness that matched his own. Those sparkling cuffs would never be stained with the gravy of the war though the hands had dipped into it often enough. A southerner, he was as sincere as one of those rococo altarpieces – all fat cherubs and barley sugar – that they did you in Bavarian churches.
“Tell me.” Kessel leaned his seal-like, brilliantined head closer to Lauterbach’s ear. “What does order 87/562 mean to you?”
“Absolutely nothing – except of course that 562 is the code for the Emden.”
“Quite so. I don’t think the order ever got to the ship but it got through to all Etappe posts out East in October and had them running round like headless chickens. The Admiralty were doing a favour for the Foreign Office. Two old chums must have had lunch in Berlin and decided that the Emden should make a landing on the Andaman Islands at Port Blair where the British have their penal settlement. Apparently there are 1,500 Indian revolutionaries interned there all dying to work for German victory. You were to take the prison, arm the revolutionaries and release them on the Indian coast.” He grinned. “Sounds good eh? What do you think?”
“Bloody nonsense,” growled Lauterbach, exacting bitter revenge on his beer. “A cruiser is hardly the best vehicle to take a prison. You can be sure that all the intelligence would be wrong – just as it was on Cocos-Keeling. I’d give you even money the revolutionaries aren’t even there, that they were moved two years ago to some other hellhole. And what are Indian revolutionaries, anyway? Skinny blokes who write hot newspaper articles about not paying taxes, like as not, and don’t know one end of a rifle from the other. The Brits would round them up in a couple of days and it would be all for nothing. With intellectuals even the natives would be falling over themselves to hand them in.”
Kessel threw back his head and roared with laughter. “Quite so. I knew you’d see it my way. I got the order squashed. After all, you were doing more important things on your own. It would have been stupid to distract you.”
He semaphored energetically to the bar for more drink, pointed at Lauterbach’s glass, signalled some more, saluted and grinned. Message received and understood by the giggling barman.
“But now it has come up again and they’re after a chap who could take it on. No warship this time – it’s being done on the cheap – just a shipment of old arms from San Francisco and the revolutionaries would have to do their own fighting.”
Lauterbach collapsed across the table and groaned just as the drink arrived. The boy, disconcerted, started to take it away again. Kessel leapt lithely from his chair and seized it with both hands.
“Think what a price the Brits would put on your head this time,” he grinned innocently, pressing a glass into Lauterbach’s paw and clinking against it. “Think of the honour.”
Lauterbach drew himself together and rose unwillingly like a bear awaking from hibernation. “As a serving officer, my duty is to report back for active service as soon as possible. I cannot go West through the British blockade, so I must go East through China, avoid Hong Kong and Japan and get to America. To steer for India would be simply to head in the wrong direction.”
Kessel laughed again and applauded. “Well done, Juli-bumm. I knew you’d have a reason not to get mixed up in such tomfoolery. So I’ve fixed it all with H.E. You’re to be sent East and asked to carry urgent secret despatches to Shanghai on your way home, all costs paid. I don’t know what the despatches are, I haven’t invented that bit yet. Anyway, I think you owe me the next drink but that’ll have to be some other time. Got to get that paper out to a panting world.” He typed a quick sentence with his fingers in the air. “Bye Juli-bumm …”
Lauterbach felt a great weight slip from his shoulders. He must get out of Dutch territory fast. He dare not fall into British or Japanese
hands. China was home, even if Tsingtao was now an enemy land. A government postman? It would do. The gloom had lifted. He shrugged happily and looked up to beckon the boy for the bill, then suddenly saw a familiar figure, sitting by the door. It was the lavender man from Padang, fanning himself with his hat and staring off into space.
Lauterbach rose and slowly crossed the bar, strolling down the corridor towards the cloakroom with a feigned planter’s insouciance, a man for whom time was measured not in minutes but in seasons. From the other side of the door, despite the best efforts of the servants, there seeped an acrid whiff of petai, the soft, bitter bean that was newly in season and scented a man’s pee like asparagus. Not pausing to ease the contents of a full bladder, he crept back to the corridor and leapt up the stairs to the first floor where sleeping accommodation was available for out-of-town members at reasonable rates, hastened to the end of the long verandah that fronted all the rooms and rattled down the second spiral staircase that led to the side of the building. A few strides brought him to the pavement. He turned right and moved swiftly towards the Governor General’s palace with its odious pink hydrangeas in pots. They always made him think of the sagging breasts of old women. There was heavy traffic. Everything from motorcars to rickshaws wove in and out of the sunshine and shade and the pavement was full of bustling traders and self-important officials with folders of papers. Outside the square white facade, Dutch soldiers stood on guard in businesslike khaki, not fancy ceremonial uniforms, a sort of token recognition of the war that ravaged the wider world. He turned right again down a sidestreet and made his way purposefully to the huge square that marks the centre of the city, stepped back into one of the shrubbery arbours and sat on the bony seat, leaning back into shade to wait.
A white woman went past in noisy, clomping shoes, walking a fat dog with lots of ears. After a few minutes a chocolate-coloured car turned gently into the square, drew up opposite, then set off slowly again with a crunching of gears. A small brown child with its finger in its mouth stole round the edge of the arbour and stared at him with enormous eyes of wonder. He made a pig’s face and it ran away laughing. Several minutes crept by on tiptoe. The chocolate-coloured car reappeared, cruised round the square and drove past again. At the wheel was a tiny man with his hat well pulled down Etappe fashion. Who else wore a hat inside a car? It stopped, pulled over to the kerb out of sight and Lauterbach heard the slam of a door and the scuffle of approaching feet. When he came round the corner of the arbour he was Japanese, sharp lapels, sharp nose, sharp little parti-coloured shoes, thin moustache, a tie so loud it shouted and socks with clockfaces on them. The wire glasses strapped to his delicate ears seemed like an instrument of torture. He must have dropped the hat on the seat before climbing out. His clothes looked as if they had been sent from abroad by different wellwishers, each in total ignorance of the others. Something about his movements suggested a dancer. He walked with odd precision over to the bench, dusted it off fastidiously with the folded newspaper he was carrying and sat. Lauterbach, feeling he was getting the hang of this, fanned himself with his hat and stared into space. In such a public place he had no need to fear a knife slid between his ribs.
The little man cleared his throat. “Captain Lauterbach I presume?”
Lauterbach stared back in silence. In his mind he deleted the little moustache, added a beard, restyled the hair. Nothing. “Have we met before?”
The Japanese grinned and hissed, turned lost-dog eyes on him. “No, Captain Lauterbach. I have not had that honour. But your face is known to me from the newspapers.” And the wanted poster with the reward on it, thought Lauterbach. The voice was low-pitched, silky. “My name is Katsura. I apologise to trouble you like this but it is a matter of mutual advantage. I am lowly employee at the Japanese embassy, in the consular section. I understand you wish to leave Java and regain your native land. Though our nations are at war, I have always had high regard for Germans and an umbrella may shield a man from sunshine as well as from rain. After all, both our nations seek only the recognition of their proper place in the world. Consider how well we treat your prisoners of war, yes please.”
Lauterbach felt a flare of outrage. He was meeting all the high-principled diplomats today. “In Tsingtao for example?” What prisoners of war? The Japanese and Brits had blown it to bits. For Lauterbach war had never been about abstract principles but about the detonation of friends. That made it both alien to his nature and deeply personal.
The little man detected no irony. “Precisely. But this is a neutral place where we are free to pursue our own interests, yes please. I wish to warn you. Do not travel again under the name of Gilbert. It has been marked down and will be immediately reported if you book onto any of the ships in that identity …”
He broke off as the woman with the fat dog came back the other way. The dog looked at them, dug in its heels, crouched and laid a long turd carefully on the pavement, watching them intently the while as if seeking a reaction. Then it stuck out its tongue and frisked off. Its product was not the usual twirled meringue affair but a long straight line, skilfully executed by the dog’s advancing at a rate precisely commensurate with its exit. They both contemplated the turd in Zen silence.
“If you will look inside the newspaper you will find something there I believe to be of interest to you.”
With some trepidation, Lauterbach reached down and took the newspaper that lay between them, riffling its pages with his fingertips. No turd inside but a Dutch passport, apparently genuine, made out to Dr Blaamo. He examined the particulars. Age, height, weight of the personal description were all about right for him. He could certainly travel on it without fear of detection, with a little doctoring. Blaamo suggested someone moon-faced and clean-shaven. That could be arranged. But why was a Japanese helping him in this way? He looked again at the turd. It seemed to be trying to tell him something.
“You will be wondering Captain Lauterbach just why a son of Japan should help a German sailor in this way?” Katsura tittered.
He smiled back stiffly. “Well … it had crossed my mind Mr Katsura.”
“It is very simple, yes please.” Katsura nodded and grinned. “First you will please give me one hundred American dollar. I am not well paid and the money is needed for an urgent purpose. Also, at the very beginning of the war, you may remember that your own ship, the Emden encountered a Japanese passenger ship off Sumatra and spared her. My wife and child were on that vessel. It was a very gentlemanly act. I feel for them both melty love.” His eyes swam behind the thick lenses.
Of course, that passenger ship. They had not known that they were at war and cursed their luck at having to let her pass. They would much rather have looted her, blown a hole in her and sent her to the bottom. Melty love? The expression ricocheted round his brain – a brief image of a block of Swiss hazelnut the instant before it gushed sweetness over his tongue. Lauterbach smiled and covered his teeth with the passport. As the edge of it passed over his moustache, he caught a slight but unmistakable whiff of lavender, like a memory borne on a distant Provencal breeze. An odd way to smell a rat. This was clearly a trap, then. By selling him this excellent passport they were encouraging him to flee from this limited safety of Batavia to a spot where they might more easily lay hands on both him and the reward. They would simply have to watch the shipping manifests and when Blaamo came up, the vessel would be neatly intercepted in international waters and goodbye to Lauterbach. They must think him very stupid, which was good. Well two could play at that game.
“Very well, Mr Katsura. I agree to your proposition. I thank you. You are doing me a great personal service.” He did not have a hundred dollars in his wallet. “Excuse me.”
To Katsura’s obvious horror, he rose, walked to the back of the arbour and relieved his bladder over the grateful hibiscus with loud manly splashing, emitting grunts of satisfaction and digging the while in the cummerbund pocket till he fished out an appropriate denomination. Katsura averted his eyes and stared
red-faced at the turd, less embarrassing, it seemed, than the sounds of micturation. Having wiped his fingers politely on the seat of his trousers, Lauterbach reached over from behind, scooped up newspaper and parcel and deposited the note smoothly in Katsura’s top pocket.
“My regards to your honourable wife and child.”
Katsura leapt to his feet grinning and bowing, reversing out onto the pavement with a hiss as of wet tyres. “Thank you. Thank you, yes please.” As he gave one last reverential bow, he set his foot squarely in the turd.
Chapter Ten
“Purely officially, you’re on your way to Hong Kong,” Kessell executed a complicated foot manoeuvre on the pedals, like a man playing a Bach flourish on a cathedral organ, and kneed Lauterbach in the face. “Sorry old man, not the best place to be lying I know.” Lauterbach was rolled up on the floor of the Mercedes as they roared at high speed along the main road to the north. Indignity was a price he was willing to pay for a little more security. “I think you might as well come out now. If you are going to be spotted by any spies that’s already happened long ago.”
“Hong Kong?” He emerged and clambered up onto the seat like some unruly crotch-sniffing dog. Red-faced and panting, hair spiked into a madman’s halo and soaked in sweat. Even at this hour the furnace of Java was being stoked He was nervous, excited, loth to move on, cursing the world that would not leave him in peace, that lashed him to this eternal desperate nomadism. Why not stay here, settle down, take a wife, raise little Lauterbaecher? He had never dreamed of such a thing when shackled to a steamship. Now domesticity seemed abruptly a beguiling prospect. As he steamed around the east, he had not realised the importance of that unchanging cabin as his only security, his anchor. Even tribal nomads when they moved from place to place, pitched the same tent with the same known and familiar objects in the same arrangement, wherever that might be on the face of the planet. He did not just hang his hat on the back of the cabin door, he realised, but his whole identity that was carved into the fabric of the room like the lines on his face. The marks scored into the headboard of the bed recalled a raucous fling with a long-taloned ronggeng dancer off Java. The burn on the tea table was from a cigar left too long unpuffed during an unaccustomed ejaculatory difficulty off Shanghai. The cracked glass marked a bout of fisticuffs with a stroppy first mate whose skull he had similarly split. And now they were gone and the tale of his life had gone with them.