by Nigel Barley
“Taxi!” he called in his most patrician tones. “You takee German ship, chop-chop.” He clambered aboard and gushed filthy water on all sides. The boatman stared, open-mouthed. “Chop-chop,” snapped Lauterbach sitting down primly by the stern as if this were a totally regular means of hiring a taxi.
The French concession in Shanghai was one of the more relaxed. It financed itself largely through the pleasures of the flesh and many of the girls who worked in the Lane of Lingering Happiness housed in the cheap tenements around the Avenue Joffre. The German concession lay just north of it around Kraetkestrasse, a place of offices and counting-houses, and the familiarity of the name, the same as his old ship, leapt at Lauterbach as he swung down from the tram and picked his way carefully over the rails. His thigh still ached.
The German consul, Herr Wolf, was a fussy little man after whom no ships or roads were likely ever to be named and he operated from a darkly panelled office that concentrated down the sticky Shanghai heat and made it totally intolerable. Thick carpet kept noise and humidity in. The only dry thing was the rasping tick of a heavy wallclock in a marble case. the shape of the Brandenburg gate. Lauterbach appraised it charitably. A clock in an office always added a touch of class. They sat across a desk with great bow legs like his grandmother’s sideboard.
Herr Wolf had a cold. “Lauterbach?” he sniffed. There was a shaving rash under his left ear. “Don’t know you do I? You must make an appointment, I’m afraid. I have an urgent meeting across town.” He snorted tiredly into a handkerchief and looked at the clock as if expecting it to confirm his story but the golf bag leaning against his chair spoke louder.
Lauterbach sighed, unintimidated by this sheep in wolf’s clothing. “Herr Wolf. I have with me certain secret documents from our Batavia legation that I have carried at great personal risk and I am eager to disembarrass myself of them before they fall into the wrong hands.” He pulled the packet from his side-pocket and pushed it over the desk so that it came to rest on the blotter where Herr Wolf sat and looked at it appalled, careful not to touch. To touch would be to assume responsibility.
“This is really most irregular.” He reached for the phone, thought better of it, sneezed, and put his hands in his lap. Then he reached for a pencil and poked at the despatches as at an unclean thing. “They are not, I note, actually addressed to me. How am I to know they were intended for myself and not another?”
Lauterbach shrugged and stared at the Emperor’s portrait nailed to the wall. There was something odd about it. “No doubt the first letter contains information about myself and the content of the other letters, if you care to look at it.”
“What? Have you read these papers?” Wolf was becoming as angry as his rash and he scratched at it in rage. “That too is most improper and an offence under German law.” He sulked and breathed heavily through his mouth. Lauterbach realised what it was with the portrait. A house lizard had got behind it and was rocking up and down so that the imperial moustache twitched as though in patrician distaste. Lauterbach had confidently expected a warm and enthusiastic welcome, Etappe housing, a fake passport or two, more money. This would not do at all. Wolf sniffed back snot.
“You will have to come back tomorrow. I cannot possibly deal with such an extraordinary matter now.” He pushed the letters back with his hankie and made the face of a man straining against constipation.
“And what if the British shoot me dead in the interim?” Lauterbach shoved them back yet again, stuck out his jaw. “They have already made one attempt on my life.”
“In that case do not come back. Atchoo!” Witty. Very. The man was a fool and this was a waste of time. No matter. Lauterbach knew his way around this town and had more than one string to his bow. There was a squeal of tyres and a furious honking outside. That would be another of the strings. Without another word, he stood up and walked out, leaving Wolf looking down stupidly at the letters.
Rosa was Eurasian and of good Shanghai patrician family which is to say that her father was an English trader while her mother had formerly worked in the entertainment business but was now redeemed as a devotee of bridge and lawn tennis. Rosa had clearly got her legs from her mother. Lauterbach looked at her fondly as she sat smoking in her little yellow convertible outside the German consulate. A knot of tangled emotions stirred in him. Was this love? The word was difficult. It was at least affectionate lust that stirred in his breast and elsewhere. He walked over and knocked on the window.
“Darling!” Her whole face lit up. She leaned across, wound down the window and kissed him briskly on the lips. He opened the door and slid in beside her. She was about thirty-five, dark, with big, brown, almond eyes and those tiny even little teeth only Asians can have. She exuded warm feral odours. The Lauterbach torpedo armed itself as he slid a hand over her shoulders. He should have brought the traditional flowers – what Schwabe termed “a bundle of plant sex organs.” Women liked that sort of thing.
“Thank you for coming.”
She laughed. “So formal darling. Would you like to have it off?” Shock showed on his face. She laughed again. “The roof, you idiot. Shall we have the roof off?”
“Better not.” He settled back into his seat. “As I explained on the phone, I need to hide out for a few days. I wondered about that big old house of yours in the country? Do you still have it by any chance?”
She started the engine and shifted into gear, the slit in her skirt showing a haunch of appetising pale thigh. “No problem. These days you can’t give away an old pile like that. Anyway,” she laughed and looked at him fondly, “I’d do anything for an old shipmate.”
They had met on the old Staatsekretaer a few years back and one thing had led to … a repetition of that one thing throughout the journey to their great mutual pleasure. He had written to her from the camp in Singapore and she had sent a reply of such anatomical intimacy that the shocked censor had let all future letters through unopened. Rosa was an independent woman who ran her own club, The Wild West, in the lively Foochow district. Having noted the relatively high pay of American doughboys, she had set up a cosy bar to cater specifically for them, American drinks and music, a decor involving table lamps in the form of the Statue of Liberty and girls who might or might not be nice but were always clean and had no holes in their underwear.
They bowled along beside the Huangpo river, heading out for the expansive countryside otherwise known as China. Lauterbach kept an eye out for anyone who might be following them but once they were outside the foreign concessions, vehicles were few and they were virtually alone on the dry dirt road. After a while the lanes lost their obsession with straight lines and settled to a meandering pattern between parched fields, as though their course had been fixed by a man chasing a pig. Ten miles further on, they took a right turn and drove slowly down a rutted track to a big placid house, transplanted from the Surrey hills and hidden in pine trees. Ancient gardeners bowed deferentially as they crunched past. They seemed older than the trees.
“It looks just the same.”
“Of course, darling. We sometimes use it for weekend parties, politicians and such but it’s the quiet season.” She squeezed his hand. “Just us.”
The next two days passed in a golden haze of the senses. They ate, drank, made love and then, one night, he said.very deliberately, “I want you to do something for me.”
Rosa burst into tears. “Sorry,” she sobbed. “I’ve been waiting for you to say that. I know this can’t last, that we have to have our fun while we can and not take things too seriously. We both knew that from the start and I’m not complaining.” He said nothing, just hugged her in the dark till his arms ached and she fell fitfully asleep. She was a grand girl and of his ‘ladyfriends’ she was closest to being a proper friend. But his mind tossed and turned in the night. He quarried her sleeping silence for proofs of his own failings. What was it he really wanted? Freedom or security or simply that constant alternation that is the sailor’s life? Sailing the seas thinking of
home or sitting at home missing the sea? Caring for someone made you strong but it also made you weak since terrible things could happen to them. Caring about anything was dangerous. He had intended to ask her to sell the flat for him but now he could not. He would have to leave it as an unredeemed pledge that he would be back after the war. No, wait. The property market was at its peak. He would quietly ask someone else to sell it and then, if he returned, go back into the market at a lower price. Surely, there was no harm in that? Rosa would never know. He sighed. He wanted to be happy but feared that God had simply made him sad. With the clarity of vision that comes in the dark, he realised that his lovelife was organised on the same model as his looting forrays on the Emden – a dispassionate inventory, followed by a ruthless ransacking that met his immediate needs, followed by moving on. He lay awake brooding muzzily until the early morning grey crept through the frilly curtains. Just as he fell asleep, Rosa awoke and drove back in the first light to the city, leaving him alone. He awoke sad and with a terrible taste in his mouth. Perhaps it was the taste of melty love but more likely just a tongue parched from too much snoring.
Two days later she was there again, smiling, makeup bright and cheerful, dressed in a fresh new two-piece, the car full of parcels.
“Here you are darling. Everything you wanted.” They went giggling up to the bedroom where Lauterbach excitedly tried on his brand new uniform of a sailmaker’s mate, first class, in the US navy. A few weeks before, to crown an evening of hard socialising, petty officer William Johnson had engaged in mild fisticuffs at The Wild West and so lost his wallet, passport and other documents as well as two teeth. The papers had been adjusted to fit Lauterbach. Last, she gave him an envelope containing a ticket aboard the SS Mongolia, an American-registered Pacific mailboat, sailing for San Francisco via Nagasaki and Yokohama. The froth of US war fever had now subsided as swiftly as it had boiled up and there was no longer an immediate risk of a declaration of hostilities and the sailing was in two days’ time. Rosa did not cry again and wore a constant bright smile that was more frightening to Lauterbach than tears. And that night she broke a long-standing house rule and made love to a man who wore the uniform of the US navy.
Chapter Twelve
Dear Detective Namura,
Many thanks for the guided tour of Yokohama. Without your help I should never have gained access to the many interesting experiences vouchsafed by that fair city whose hidden side you know so well. I assume you have still not fulfilled your dreams by arresting that desperado from the Emden whose capture was such a focus of your concerns when we were together. Look at my signature and hang on to a single thought – that you briefly held ten thousand pounds in your hands but let it slip through your fingers. Think what you might have done with that money! Thank you for the Hawaiian shirt. I have had it made into a dress for my mother and the rest of the material makes an excellent bedspread.
Yours sincerely,
Captain Julius Lauterbach
Lauterbach made his entry aboard the Mongolia in style. Rosa had borrowed the steam launch of a fabulously wealthy Chinese taipan and decked it out with three large versions of the Stars and Stripes and a small brass band. The British officials, scanning the faces and documents of the many furtive passengers aboard the normal tender, were dazzled by the boat’s sheer chrome and mahogany razzmatazz. A cast of Rosa’s friends had been recruited to wave tearful farewells. Lauterbach stood tall in his new uniform. Looser and less tapered of cut and of thicker material than his German outfits, he had the feel of a man sleepwalking in pyjamas. Another friend, an employee of the American News of Shanghai, had slipped a short notice into the paper to the effect that Julius Lauterbach had been “reliably reported by wireless telegraphy” as taken into custody aboard the SS Mounteagle off British Columbia. It was speculated that he would be returned to Singapore for trial. Lauterbach read it with pleasure. He was getting used to reading his own obituary and it had become a sort of proof he was still alive and kicking.
He went below to his cabin but the presence of his travelling companion, a devout and fussy clergyman who took an impertinent interest in the state of his soul, irritated him and anyway he did not want too much time to sit and think about Rosa, so he was driven back on deck. There is a tireless fascination in sea departures and his practised eye was soothed by the regular flow of goods and supplies, the hundred little preparations for sailing that are the mark of professional seamanship. But all at once the good order was disturbed by a sudden flurry of activity near the gangplank as a team of British customs officials with clipboards came on deck and started checking identities. That he did not like that at all. Shanghai was normally so relaxed that even passports were not strictly required. He turned on his heel and wandered away, keeping just ahead of them, towards the middle deck. Ducking down a corridor he came to the barber’s shop, empty of course at this stage of the voyage, and pushed through the swing doors, swathed himself in a large towel, chose a chair with its back to the door and draped his American officer’s jacket ostentatiously over it, then hastily soaped his face from neck to eyebrows and worked it up to a thick lather. He settled back cosily in the chair like a waiting customer and lit a carefree cigar. The customs men appeared in the door, saw the uniform and foaming Lauterbach raising his hand, in the mirror, in friendly – Hi folks – greeting. They smiled, saluted and withdrew. Twenty minutes later, amidst honking and the ringing up of commands, the Mongolia finally weighed anchor and set sail.
The ship soon settled to a regular routine with Philippino stewards ranging the corridors with their tinkling gongs to entice passengers to eat. There were other US military travellers, a loud and opinionated general and entourage, a dour admiral, a couple of rangy, hard-drinking colonels always the last to desert the bar at night. Lauterbach decided they were best avoided as too many akward questions could arise that might not be covered by a simple claim of good German-Milwaukee ancestry. There were ladies enough to be beguiled by a well-cut uniform but he was still sated and doggedly depressed from Rosa and so the Lauterbach torpedo slumbered sullenly in its cradle. He drove people away with deliberately plebeian habits, smoking a foul-smelling pipe, digging with his fingers in his nose and examining the product against the light and spitting about the deck, lavishly and with bad aim.
There was no lack of Japanese, either, pattering about the ship and initially he found himself keeping a wary eye open for Katsura. Time could be spent agreeably enough playing cards with some commercial gentlemen or reading in the library and he took pains to be the first to the dining room, ordering the simplest dish and dashing away wiping his mouth before most had even finished dressing. An aged English lady, dry as a tortoise, challenged him to a daily game of scrabble after lunch, drubbed him regularly but accepted all his wilder spelling mistakes as correct American orthography. It became just another regular feature of his pensioner’s schedule.
Three days’ sailing brought them to Nagasaki. The usual medical officer came aboard by launch to enquire into the risk of infectious disease on the vessel. Lauterbach, posted on deck, noted carefully the standard yellow flag, flying from the back of the launch. He knew from experience that Japanese doctors took themselves seriously at such formalities, sometimes insisting on examining tongues as well as passports. But this doctor did not come unaccompanied, indeed a whole troop of uniformed officials followed on his heels and, worse yet, all passengers were summoned to appear in the smoking saloon with their travel documents. Fear gripped his bowels. Escape was impossible, since they were anchored well out in the roadstead and there was no hope of slipping over the side and swimming for it. Moreover, this was the most well-disciplined harbour in the East and no small boats approached the big liners as in other ports, so he would have to take his chances with the rest. The little revolver weighed heavy in his jacket pocket. They would not, he resolved, take him without a fight.
The saloon was a big, frowsy room, smelling, appropriately enough, of cigars and a lot of the ladies we
re doing a business of sniffing and clamping little white hankies disgustedly to their faces. The Japanese officials were seated stiffly at a card table with manifests and such like before them. Lauterbach settled to wait as far from them as possible, eyes and ears alert. A little man with thick glasses and bandy legs, clearly the senior officer, stood up with the authority of his shiny boots. “Is there an American officer here called Johnson?” Blood thundered in his ears. They knew! Someone must have seen him in Shanghai and sent word via the undersea cable. He looked round again for Katsura, somehow convinced he must be behind this.
“Mr Johnson please. Is there a Mr Johnson?” Lauterbach sat firm on his fat sofa at the far end of the room and stared into space. They would have to ask him to his face. He would pretend to be deaf. He would clutch at his heart and faint. Another Japanese took up the cry.
“Please pay attention, ladies and gentlemen. We are looking only for Mr Johnson. No one can leave the ship until he reports to us.”
The old scrabble lady was looking at him significantly with her watery eyes, hand half-raised like the class sneak, as if to denounce him with a seven-letter word. Would she really remember his name? He realised suddenly in despair that it was all pointless. He was only putting off the evil moment by a few more minutes. Best get this over with and hang on to a little dignity. No wait. Sod dignity. Every minute was precious. He turned to see one of the boozy colonels stepping up, with care, to the table, cigarette in hand, dark glasses over his eyes.
“Johnson?” he asked with deep south, mint julip courtesy and breathed smoke. “I guess you gentlemen mean me – sorry I’m late – we had quite a session at the bar last night – but it’s not Mr It’s Colonel Johnson.”
Lauterbach went weak at the knees, collapsed heavily, whimpered thanks to the deity. Two Johnsons! There were two Johnsons on board. Thank God he had chosen such a common name.