Jack of Spies (5 page)

It was clear that he loved his train and the pretty German stations, so out of place against the Chinese backdrop. He told McColl about the line’s short history and how flat it was, with several hundred bridges and not a single tunnel. He pointed out kilns by the
side of the line, where bricks had been baked and then broken for ballast, because Shantung province was devoid of suitable stones.

McColl responded with a wholly fictional life, which he located in Alsace to mask any linguistic mistakes. It was a relief to be speaking openly again, after a fortnight of pretending not to speak German, and he found himself liking the conductor. It was a strange place for a German to end up, but this one seemed at peace with himself and the world.

The man left after an hour or so, and McColl sat there watching the barely changing scene through his window—a wide valley dotted by small villages, an occasional row of planters in the winter fields, the distant line of brown mountains under a gray sky. He eventually woke with a jolt of alarm, but it was only a coal train rumbling past in the opposite direction, bound for Tsingtau and von Spee’s ships. He imagined the colliers steaming out into the wide Pacific, dropping their loads on a hundred scattered islands for the future use of a fugitive fleet.

He thought about the girl the Germans had arrested. What would they do to her? If it had been Hsu Ch’ing-lan’s cousin, then Ch’ing-lan would have moved heaven and earth to save her—that was the Chinese way. But Pao-yu wasn’t family—at least not as far as McColl knew—and if not she’d probably just be abandoned. Which was also the Chinese way.

There was nothing he could do for her now.

After Wei, the mountains grew higher and the valley seemed less populated. It was almost a shock when a mining complex suddenly appeared in the window, complete with winding gear and mountains of glistening coal. Black-faced Chinese coolies were doing all the work, dragging carts of coal up ramps and tipping them into the railway wagons. Three German overseers were standing to one side, comparing notes about something or other.

The train soon stopped at a station, and two more Germans got on. They ignored the Chinese people who had bowed to McColl
and then ignored him, too, as if intent on proving that race had no part in their arrogance. Which suited him well enough—if word of his escape were clicking along the telegraph wires, it clearly hadn’t reached them.

But it had been clicking—he was almost certain of that. Failing to find him in Tsingtau, the Germans were bound to spread the net wider. They might not know he was headed their way, but the German authorities in Tsinan would certainly be on the lookout.

The last major stop was Tschou-tsun. After the train pulled out, the conductor stopped for another chat, and there was no change in his manner to suggest fresh intelligence, causing McColl to wonder whether he himself was in flight from a phantom. Maybe the girl was still refusing to speak or didn’t know his name—that was something he should have asked Hsu Ch’ing-lan about. This wasn’t his finest hour, he realized. His report to Cumming would need some glossing.

And he still had Tsinan to cope with. His best bet, he decided, was a variation on his departure from Tsingtau. On the journey down from Peking ten days earlier, he had noticed that Tsinan had two stations, one where travelers on the Peking–Pukow line changed for the Shantung Railway and another, closer to the town, that was served only by the latter. Any pursuers would assume he had a through ticket and would be waiting at the junction. If he got off at the town station and took a rickshaw across town, there was a reasonable chance he could sneak aboard the Pukow train without being seen.

The last stage of the journey seemed eternal, but the straggling outskirts of Tsinan finally appeared in his window, and almost immediately the train began to slow. He grabbed his suitcase and made for the vestibule farthest from the luggage car and the conductor.

The line was running along a slight embankment between a series of small lakes, the town visible beyond those to the south. The moment the train stopped, the Chinese passengers in the
open wagons were dropping the sides, leaping down to the ground, and hurrying away. Cautiously inching an eye around the corner of his carriage, McColl saw the conductor sharing a convivial word with another German stationmaster. There were no other uniforms on display.

On the other side of the train, a team of coolies was transferring sacks of rice from a boxcar to a line of waiting carts. When the whistle blew and the train began to move, McColl stepped nimbly down and watched it steam away. It couldn’t be much more than a mile to the other station, and for a moment he considered simply walking down the track. But the land on both sides was open, and there was still too much light in the sky—he would stick to his plan.

Which proved harder than expected. The rickshaw coolie he tried to engage spoke no dialect that McColl could understand and needed more than a little convincing from a better-traveled colleague that this foreigner wanted transport to the town’s other station—a station he could have reached much more simply and cheaply by staying on his train. Once persuaded that his prospective passenger wasn’t simply deranged—or at least not dangerously so—he allowed McColl into the seat, picked up the bamboo shafts, and set off at a steady jog for the city gate some two hundred yards distant.

Passing through this, the rickshaw swayed along a narrow street that ran parallel to the town’s crumbling wall. This was the old China, seemingly untouched by progress, its buildings dirty and decaying, its children half naked and clearly malnourished. Stares followed McColl, and one beggar ran after the rickshaw, stretching out a hand until he tripped on the uneven road.

The coolie crossed a stinking canal, turned through another gate behind a scurrying rat, and emerged onto a slightly more prosperous street. Several artisans were working outside their shops, making the most of the remaining light, and a brazier was burning in front of a small hardware emporium, the hanging copper pots reflecting the fire. The smell of food from a couple of cafés
reminded McColl that he’d hardly eaten that day and started his stomach rumbling. Two more coolies ran by with a sedan chair, and he caught a glimpse of an old woman’s face within.

They skirted a small lake and headed up a long, straight street toward what looked like a railway station. A column of smoke, dyed red by the sinking sun, rose up behind the German roof, confirming the fact. McColl waited until they were a short walk away, then shouted to the coolie to stop. The man did so with obvious reluctance but conjured up a toothless smile when the foreign devil overpaid him.

McColl walked toward the station, keeping to the rapidly deepening shadows on one side of the street. There was an automobile and at least a dozen rickshaws in the forecourt, all waiting, no doubt, for the train from the north. He ignored the gaslit booking hall, cautiously worked his way around the building, and found an area of shadow from which he could safely scan the platform. The first thing he noticed was a group of uniformed Germans, who seemed to be interrogating his friend the conductor. The train that had brought him from Tsingtau was sitting in the bay platform, lazily oozing steam.

So he hadn’t been overreacting—they really were after him.

He took in the rest of the tableau. The platform lamps were glowing in the gloom, and there were several dozen Chinese people waiting for his train, many with several items of luggage. At the other end of the platform, four coolies were waiting with shovels beside a coal wagon, ready to refuel the incoming engine. One of the uniformed officers seemed to be staring straight at McColl, which gave him a moment of acute anxiety. But he soon looked away. The darkness was apparently enough of a cloak.

There was nothing to do but wait and take whatever chance was offered to get aboard the train. The minutes turned into an hour, and the temperature steadily dropped, but at least the darkness deepened.

There were several blows on the whistle before the headlight
swam into view and the train steamed in alongside the low continental platform. It was more prepossessing than the one from Tsingtau, with five European-built carriages and no open wagons. The moment it clanked to a halt, scrimmages developed at all the vestibule doors as Chinese passengers trying to alight collided with those seeking entry. Above their heads the peaked caps of the German police were turning this way and that, looking for a British spy.

Up ahead the pipe from the water tank was being slewed across the tender, and beyond it the coolies were presumably shoveling coal. He had at least ten minutes, but there was no way he could cross the wide platform without being seen.

Two of the policemen were boarding the train, but the others were still keeping watch outside. He should have crossed the tracks out of sight of the platform and waited on the other side, but it was too late for that now.

He suddenly had an idea. He walked quickly back to the forecourt and up to the last rickshaw in line. “Hat,” he said in Shanghainese, pointing it out for greater clarity and waving a note worth twenty times as much under the man’s eyes. The coolie gave him an
Is this really Christmas?
look and slowly removed his conical headgear. McColl handed him the note, grabbed the hat, and walked back toward the platform. The police were still there, and the train seemed almost set to leave—there was nothing else for it. He put on the hat, arranged his suitcase so that it would be shielded by his body, and started the long, semicircular walk that would take him around the back of the train. He was too tall and the suitcase too big, but out where the light barely reached, he was hoping they’d see only the hat.

And it worked. Thirty nerve-racking seconds and he was behind the train, looking up at the dimly lit carriages. As he reached the inner end of the last carriage, the whistle sounded, and almost instantly the wheels began to turn. He stepped aboard and climbed up onto the vestibule platform. The temptation to stand and wave
his coolie hat at the Germans was enormous, but discretion triumphed. He ducked inside what was clearly a third-class carriage and strode up the aisle in search of less crowded accommodation.

The Chinese passengers, noticing his bizarre souvenir, seemed relieved to see him pass. They were doubtless thinking that he would be more at home in first, with all the other inscrutable foreign devils.

The House Off Bubbling Well Road

Most of those traveling first class were European, and the only two Chinese occupants of the carriage were dressed in Western attire. McColl exchanged smiles with a couple of fellow Englishmen whom he recognized from his time in Peking and, after placing his suitcase in the luggage rack, gratefully sank into the forward-facing seat of the last unoccupied booth. The train was already out in open country and rapidly gathering speed.

The carriage had modern electric lights, both along the ceiling and above the seats. He took time to scan the other passengers, taking care not to arouse suspicion, and saw none who looked obviously German. Seeking to untangle the low murmur of voices, he could pick out only English, French, and Chinese.

Surely he was safe for now. There might be Germans waiting in Nanking or Shanghai, but they had no jurisdiction in either. He just had to reach a telegraph office and send off the information he’d gathered, and they would have to accept that further pursuit was meaningless.

He closed his eyes and realized how easy it would be to fall asleep. But first there was work to do—summarizing his findings as briefly as possible and then encrypting them for dispatch. He
pulled out his notebook and pen, ordered a whiskey from the hovering steward, and put his mind to work.

It took about two hours, and the resulting page and a half of cipher seemed a somewhat derisory return on his investment of time and money, not to mention the risk to life and limb. But the aviation unit and bigger harbor guns were new information, and he thought that Cumming would be pleased. Not enough to give him a bonus, but perhaps enough to offer more work.

He yawned, switched off the light above his seat, and turned his mind to Caitlin Hanley. It was a long time since he’d felt so attracted to a woman. The name, like the dark brown hair and green eyes, suggested Irish descent, and the New York accent had seemed softer than most he remembered, even when berating the local American consul at a diplomatic reception. “Women deserve the vote more than men do,” was the first thing he heard her say, and the patronizing chuckles that followed from the consul and his minions had been enough to make McColl intervene on her behalf. He had no strong opinions on the matter of suffrage, but he knew a bunch of reactionaries when he saw one. It was hard to imagine, he told the other men, that women would do a worse job of running the world.

She had given him a suspicious look, as if uncertain of his motives, and soon walked away to join a Western-dressed Chinese couple.

McColl wasn’t sure he had liked her, but there was something there that intrigued him, and he’d casually asked one of the junior diplomats who she was. The young man had confided her name and the fact that she was a journalist, but he hadn’t known where she was staying. Next morning McColl had left Jed and Mac to sort out the automobile’s return shipment to Shanghai and tried, unsuccessfully, to track her down. He had come up empty at all the hotels favored by foreigners, and then, remembering the Chinese couple, started on the better establishments
catering to Europeans. She was staying at the third but had just left on an overnight motorcoach excursion to the Great Wall. A small payment to one of the busboys secured the information that she was leaving in a week and had already purchased her ticket back to Shanghai.