by Nigel Barley
A smirk like a disfigurement spread across the face of the senior officer. “Oh Colonel Johnson,” he snickered and bowed, grinning round at the others. “Please forgive me, Colonel.” He reached up and whipped the dark glasses off the astonished American’s face, then snapped out an order and his henchmen circled round behind and gripped the colonel by each arm. “We are not deceived Mr – Colonel – Captain Lauterbach. You will please accompany us to headquarters where we shall look into your story. Do not worry. We shall arrange to disembark your luggage since you will not be on board when the ship sails,” They swaggered off, frogmarching him away protesting, raging, crying out for the help of the divinity and the US consul. Lauterbach rose shakily. It seemed too dangerous to stay on the ship and risky to try to get off. And then he saw the American admiral, blah-blahing and dawdling with a group of obsequious staff officers towards the gangplank. As they passed down each snapped off a salute at the Japanese officer on duty. Swiftly, he attached himself to the rear of the line and did the same, striding onto the bouncing tender as if he belonged. For the moment, he was free.
The day in Nagasaki was very long and he was painfully visible. Here, there was no possibility of merging into the landscape as in the Indies. He hid all day in a dark bar, drinking gassy beer, fearful of a tap on the shoulder. If he missed the boat, they would pick him up in a matter of hours. At dusk, he reboarded the ship on payment of another sharp salute and went back down to the cabin. For the moment, they had been thrown off his trail but, when they had established the authenticity of Colonel Johnson, would they think to look for a second Johnson aboard?
His cabin door, as he approached it, was open and a bar of light fell out into the corridor. Inside was a man with his back to him, bending over his open suitcase. Katsura? He was a small man but Lauterbach felt in his pocket all the same, where the revolver gave a warm glow of reassurance. He pushed the door wide and stepped in, closed it again behind him in case there was noise to be kept in.
The man looked up and grinned without shame. He was Japanese all right but not Katsura, young and cheesily handsome with slicked down hair. He reached into an inside pocket and drew out a badge. “Hi! Namura, detective.” He slid the badge back in the pocket and returned to rummaging in the suitcase. He would find nothing in there.
“If you told me what you were looking for I might be able to help you.”
“Just looking. Just a poor working stiff doing my job, Joe.”
“My name’s not Joe. It’s William.” Hang on better not talk about names.
“I thought maybe I’d find me one of them German officers.” He held up Lauterbach’s Chinese silk underwear quizzically. Japanese, Lauterbach recalled, wore a sort of primitive cotton loin cloth under their trousers, a fundoshi. “Weird. You know Joe I love my job. The things you learn about folks” he straightened and stared Lauterbach in the eye. “You know there’s a price on the head of those Germans, the ones on the run from Singapore?”
“Well I’m only an American officer. You wouldn’t get much for me. You speak very good English by the way, detective Namura.”
Namura blushed with pleasure. “Oh, I guess I read a lot. Then I learned plenty over the years doing the Hawaii run. Met lots of great guys and …” he winked hideously, “Dames.”
“I bet.”
“You’d be surprised how many white dames want to try a bite of real fresh-rolled sushi as a change from the old meat and potatoes.”
“I’m sure.”
Namura straightened up and squared his shoulders, threw out his pigeon chest. Instead of bowing, man of the world, he extended a tiny hand, seized Lauterbach’s paw, squeezed pathetically hard.
“I expect you’re wondering about my shirt?” Lauterbach looked. It was a curious garment, several sizes too large and cut of the loud and distasteful sort of cloth used for cheap ladies’ kimonos. Namura held back the wings of his jacket to allow greater admiration. Frail Japanese boats crashed through huge, white-crested waves over his shoulders and chest. “Great huh? From Hawaii. My uncle’s got a business there making these for the plantation guys. They just eat ‘em up. One day I’ll move over there and go in with him and get rich. One day even old guys like you will be wearing these. Great talking to you, Joe. Say, you know Japan?” He reached for the doorknob.
Lauterbach shrugged. “No. Alas I was only in Shanghai for a short time and had no chance to visit Japan.”
Namura grinned and straight-armed him to the shoulder. “Tell you what. When we get to Yokohama, I’ll look you up, show you the sights. Got to go. See you round.”
Lauterbach ran a rapid inventory of his belongings. Nothing was missing but then everything of importance was in his cummerbund pocket. Did Namura suspect something? Was it possible he was as simple as he pretended? By the time they got to Yokohama, he would surely have forgotten all about Lauterbach.
He kept a low profile. This was the most dangerous and restless part of the journey as the ship steamed peacefully in the pale sunshine of Japanese waters. What had happened to the other Johnson? Even Namura had mysteriously disappeared.
At Yokohama, he resurfaced in a police boat, surrounded by eager young men in smart blue uniforms, waving up to Lauterbach. “Hey Joe. Come on we’re all waiting for you. Yokohama’s waiting for us like I promised.” They all grinned with naughty excitement, just like the Emden boys had whenever they had been heading for shore leave. There was no way out. Lauterbach shrugged. Where, after all, could he be safer than hidden amongst a bunch of roistering baby policemen? Anyway, he needed a little harmless relaxation after the tension of the ship. Then he raised his eyes and saw a familiar complex of black steel girders at the far end of the harbour that looked very much like the floating dry dock the Japanese had stolen and towed away from blasted and looted Tsingtao. It provoked an impertinent pang of conscience and duty trying to transform the happy policemen into what von Muecke would call “the evil enemies of his nation”. Well, he wasn’t having it. He suffocated the thought at once, put a smile on his face and tripped gaily down to the launch. They hauled him laughing aboard like a sack of coal.
Namura was a stern guide. Yokohama was the most progressive city in Japan and Lauterbach was called upon to admire the modernity of every brick building, tramline and dock installation that were a Western commonplace but a Japanese novelty. He led them all to Moto Mati to see this latest wonder, a department store, where money whooshed in cannisters on wires over the customers’ heads. Lauterbach nodded dutiful astonishment like a bumpkin. But Yokohama was also the home of the Chinese traders of Japan and Lauterbach looked on their pigtails and stiff tunics with something akin to homesickness. Chinese ways too were all the rage though despised as un-Japanese. They slurped hot noodles at a Chinese stall, giggled over woodprints of drunken sailors in a Chinese shop, drank plum brandy that tasted like rancid seawater in a Chinese toddy house and all the time they sneered and giggled loudly at the Chinese.
“How you like, Japan, Joe?” asked Namura, ordering more food for his gobbling, nodding chicks.
“Marvellous,” grinned Lauterbach with total sincerity, feeling himself back in old Tsingtao. There had been so much intermarriage, so much taking of Japanese ways by Chinese and vice versa that it was sometimes hard to tell them apart here. It was odd the way that people who hated each other, Chinese and Japanese, British and German, were always indistinguishable to outsiders.
Then Namura marched them off to the Sankeien Park to stare at gloomy pools and tortured firs and bought cheap souvenirs that he heaped on Lauterbach as they drank beer in a tea house. They drank a great deal of beer. As they left, all the police cubs gathered round a tree at the entrance and gave vent to a hot and happy discussion. Threading his way, swaying, to the front, Lauterbach saw that the talk was a all about a police poster. “Twenty-five thousand yen reward,” said Namura headshaking. It was a picture of himself, fortunately a very bad, fuzzy picture from the Singapore internment, a pudgy and fair Lauterbach, beard and mo
ustache spreadeagled misleadingly over his face like a birthmark and eyes squinting into the sun. “If only we could catch this guy,” Namura sighed. “That guy they hauled off the boat today don’t look like the right gee to me but all red-faced southern barbarians look the same to us. See, he even looks like you.”
Lauterbach by now had enough drink in him to sup with the devil. “I will keep my eyes open,” he promised. “My trained vision can spot the difference between Westerners in a way yours cannot. If I see him Namura-san, I will tell you at once and we will split the money.”
Tears sprang to Namura’s eyes. They had been drinking steadily all day and, as night fell, alcohol was fermenting into maudlin sentimentality. He looked at Lauterbach with fuddled love.
“Miyozaki,” he croaked with finality, raising a finger. The word was like a magic spell. Silence fell over the policemen. The group huddled together and the word was hissed back and forth with electrical excitement.
Rickshaws were called up. Shoulders strained and feet padded to whir them out of town on a long straight road that led through a sort of dank swamp till, in the distance, an ornate gateway reared up. A temple? No. As they wheeled to a halt, painted girls looked out of upstairs windows and tittered. It was the pleasure district. Lauterbach dispensed generous gratuities to the rickshaws to cries of polite Japanese protest from the policemen. He was their guest. He must not spend his money. The manager, a fat man who had seen too much of the world, looked out without relish. Policemen did not pay for the pleasures that they took yet, in an age where licence required its own police permits, they must not be crossed.
Namura guided them confidently inside, slipping off shoes, bowing, grinning, leading Lauterbach by the hand to a tall room with tatami mats and low furniture. After some whispering with the manager, three ladies with musical instruments shuffled in on their knees and set up a discordant plonking and wailing that Lauterbach recognised as the universal sound of high culture. On the whole, the West had escaped fairly lightly with Wagner. Pots were brought and set in charcoal burners sunk into the tables with heaped up vegetables, meat and pickles on platters and Namura rolled up his sleeves and began to seethe and cook with his own hands while hot and cold sake alternated round the guests. As soon as Lauterbach touched his glass it was refilled with bowing ceremony.
“So Joe, where you from in the States?”
“Milwaukee.” Lauterbach told travellers’ tales of this place that he had never visited. He spoke of the farm where he had grown up. Its chief problem was that the grass grew so tall and lush that the cattle were constantly getting lost and they finally had to build a tall tower to spot them at milking time.
There were toasts. “To America.” “To Japan.” “To the Allied Victory.” Ah, no. There Lauterbach invoked, twinkling, the obligatory neutrality of a member of the US armed forces. Then they pushed back the table and Namura began the singing with a spirited rendition of what he believed to be the American national anthem, Yankee Doodle Dandy. Lauterbach responded in a fine bass voice, “Zu Lauterbach … Oops … Oh where oh where has my little dog gone. Oh where oh where can he be? With his ears cut short and his tail cut long …” It was, translated at length by Namura to his chicks, a sad song about a man who had lost a dog that he, personally, had mutilated in a dozen different ways before it escaped. Long Oooh’s of comprehension. Then a man with a droopy moustache sang a strident song about the beauties of Kyoto and another sang happily that there was no music as sweet as the sound of a panting woman. A panting woman? Oooh. All eyes turned on Lauterbach. Which, Namura asked smirking, was the most beautiful of the three discordant ladies. Lauterbach looked them over in his state of high inebriation. It was clear to him that they were very much the rough end of the geisha market. The thick, clownish makeup, the shape-hiding clothes did nothing to arouse the torpedo. Still politeness demanded a more gracious response.
“That one,” he pointed. “The one who looks like a whitewashed horse.”
They drank more, went back to the plum brandy that tasted of sea-water. He became aware of a furious whispering, a surreptitious passing of money – no one passes money as dicreetly as a policeman – and suddenly he was being led, lurching to a side chamber where there was a mattress spread on the floor and pushed into darkness. No not darkness, there was a vague muted glow. The horse woman was in there. This must be her stall and Lauterbach was sprawled on the bed with her pulling his clothes off and giggling. He was intrigued by the overwhelming smell of hot sugar and scorched paper that she somehow exuded. He did not resist. Why should he? She lit a thick joss stick and waved the new sickly perfume over him like the whore of Rome. He knew how this worked. It was part of the international lore of sailors. He, or rather they, had paid for the time that it took for one joss stick to burn down. If she took against him, she would blow softly on the stick as they made love to make it burn faster. To a stupid client it was the sound of a panting woman. She laid him bare and stared down at the Lauterbach torpedo – that immediately rose to the challenge, armed and cocked itself – and gasped. Then, she grinned at him and lifted up the joss stick, stuck out her tongue and gammed at the shaft, soaking it with strings of gross saliva. Now it would smoulder wetly for hours. She grinned horribly with incense-stained teeth, whinnied faintly in Japanese, cooed damply like a dove and came for him on her knees like a dog for a bone.
He arrived back at the boat with Namura, just an hour before she was due to sail, and once more his cheap souvenirs were pressed upon him. Both he and Namura were totally wrecked in body and soul, debauched, physically ill and hardly aware who or where they were – all in all a most satisfactory shore leave. On the way back, he had identified as “clearly German” two French sailors almost as extravagantly drunk as they were and the baby policemen had hauled them away with whoops of triumph to police headquarters.
On the dock, Namura gave him a final present of a gruesome Hawaiian shirt. It was cut large even for a man of Lauterbach’s proportions and featured multiple images of Mount Fuji. Both the volcano and the sky were the same shade of blue so that the mountain only appeared through the outline of white snow on its peak and sides. When he wore it, Fujis would swarm all over his body like a plague of boils. He thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen and burst into tears.
“Here you go, Joe.” Namura hugged comfort and, snufflingly, handed over brothel joss-sticks. “Any time you want to remember the beauty of Jap dames, just light one of these. I’ll come see you one day in Milwaukee. Say what’s your full name?”
“Ah … Just ask for Joe and look for the tower. Everybody knows me as Joe. I’ll send you a postcard. That’s a promise.”
Colonel Johnson had been returned to the ship sporting a black eye and a tale of indignity and abuse that shocked the American passengers into tut-tutting outrage. He had been harangued, punched, threatened with bamboo sticks and fed nothing but sticky rice. The Japanese police had sent him back huffily with scarcely a word of apology as if he had let them down by being the wrong Johnson. His dark glasses, moreover, had disappeared and been lost for ever. Another tragedy of the war. He brought with him two hundred delicate Japanese ladies, brides for the gaudy-shirted workers on the Hawaiian plantations, each chosen from her photograph. Perhaps it would work out but Japanese did not seem to Lauterbach very good at recognising people from their photographs.
Lauterbach was in a slightly difficult position. The next stop was Hawaii and if he entered American territory with a false identity, or bearing arms, or in a fake US uniform he might be interned. He waited till they were beyond territorial waters, dropped the revolver over the side, put on Namura’s Mount Fuji shirt as his only civlian clothes and went to have a word with the captain in the strictest confidence. Within an hour he was the talk of the ship. The long, slow days of scrabble were over. Now he waddled the decks displaying himself, twirling his growing moustache, dispensing grinning gallantries to all and sundry. Much of the afternoons was spent in the swimming pool
with single ladies, amongst whom he was greatly in demand, and evenings in drinking and carousing in the bar with the men. As he returned to his cabin at three in the morning a door opened and a large blonde in a small nightdress looked coyly at him round the edge and twirled a lock of her hair.
“Captain Lauterbach,” she cooed. “I couldn’t sleep and was just thinking about what you said earlier, in the pool, about torpedoes.”
He clicked his heels and bowed with tired gallantry. “Madam, with regret, the torpedoes of His Majesty’s Imperial Navy are faster, bigger and pack a greater punch than any others in the world. But like all torpedoes, they can be fired only once. I wish you good night.”
Chapter Thirteen
The picture of Colonel Johnson looked somewhat surprised on the front page of The San Francisco Chronicle, as he shielded his weak eyes from the reporters’ flashbulbs. Well he might. The headline read “Captain Lauterbach arrives in San Francisco.” It was followed by an account of a completely imaginary and sensational interview, invented presumably by the reporter rather than poor Colonel Johnson. Lauterbach smiled fatly and folded up the paper. Such confusions were the best sort, like weeds, endlessly replicating themselves and the more people tried to root them out, the tougher they became. At this moment, British agents would be carefully cutting out the picture all over the States, as his own, and thus repeating the mistake of the Japanese.
Lauterbach plunged beneath the surface of Chinatown, whence, a few days later, Dr Larsen, a large and amiable Dane, set off untroubled across the continent by the Pan Pacific Railroad. With him he took a large quantity of Lauterbach fanmail, offers of accommodation, employment and marriage, delivered to the German consulate by avid newspaper readers. He looked at his reflection in the window. Would they be disappointed or pleased that this, Lauterbach’s face, the face that had sunk a dozen ships, was not also the face of Colonel Johnson? The journey took six days during which Lauterbach revived slowly, idling in the club car, looking out on this vast, milk-fed continent while coloured boys, all teeth and shoeshine, waited on him hand and foot. He ate lobster and strawberries and washed them down with the curiously insipid American wines. The food was stolid and unimaginative, the way he liked it, not like on French trains where he had once been served a horror of raw meat and egg that he remembered ever after as “steak catarrh.” He watched his fellow passengers and liked these big-boned, beef-bulked people with their slow assurance and lack of fear.