Rogue Raider (20 page)

“Moses,” thought Lauterbach, his head giddy. “I feel like Moses looking at the promised land.”

It was Padang on the west coast of the island. They had made it clear across. Lauterbach bent forward, admiring the rich, tended landscape, sucking it in through his eyes. Better yet, cutting straight through the lush plantations, he had spotted a railway line down there, just a couple of miles away. Unlike Moses, he could catch the train straight to the heart of the promised land – first class.

Lauterbach sat cosily on the cane settee, extravagantly cushioned on all sides, elegantly clad in fresh white linen, while the electric fans worked away overhead with the combined power of a dozen demented punkah-wallahs. He was preened, purged, purified and lightly perfumed. On the table before him stood a glass of cold beer, a new hat, a smoking ashtray. He looked for all the world like a prosperous member of the
Etappe.
His paunch had been restocked by the German consul, yielding to his cries of desperate poverty. His salary would be ticking up nicely, untouched, in Germany. Across his knees lay the latest Singapore newspapers and he was mildly irritated by the ruffling draught of the fans. Urban colonial gentlemen, he found, could be irritated by very small discomforts indeed.

There was an article on the Singapore mutiny which was declared finally and officially “put down.” French, Russian and Japanese warships had converged on the harbour and debarked contingents of battle-tried marines. The ‘trim' Japanese troops had particularly distinguished themselves while Japanese civilians had been sworn in as special constables to patrol the streets of the colony. So, the British Empire was saved by the rising sons of Japan. Lauterbach laughed aloud. Wars made strange bedfellows, not that he had had many of those lately himself.

Some sepoys had got across the causeway to the mainland but not to make hay with civil order, only to surrender with due formality to the astonished Muslim Sultan of Johore. It had been a holiday with a little homicide thrown in rather than a coherent attempt to take and hold a military objective. Over 400 were now in captivity while a prominent Muslim civilian had been briskly hanged and some fifty sepoys shot by firing squad – almost the same number as the British civilians killed in the rising. A grainy picture showed crumpled bodies in British uniform lying against a long line of stakes with an officer administering a coup de grace to one of the sprawled figures with a revolver. Poor innocent Taj Mohammed! He would surely be among them. Born to be hanged for the best of motives. Lauterbach could see that it was all being tidied up and hidden away nicely. The documents would be neatly bundled up with string to be shipped home, stuck in the archives and declared secret for fifty years so that everyone could go on with the serious military business of declaring European superiority while quietly getting their promotions, medals and pensions. There had already been a number of strategic retirements and reshuffles and a certain Captain Hall seemed to have done rather well for himself out of the business.

Still, he had given the British a good scare. They had feared not only for the future of Singapore but the whole of Muslim India. Troop convoys had been disrupted. Self-confidence had been destroyed and a fatal wedge had been driven in the trust between the British and their Indian Empire. Now they would not be sending any more white troops back from the East to the Western front, at least not for a while. No, instead, they would hunt him down like a dog. He looked down at the bloated faces of the dead and abruptly felt his collar tighten around his throat as his bowels loosened. Shaking, he slackened his tie and popped his top button and gulped in gasps of air. The article ended by reminding readers that several dangerous German collaborators were still on the run and that all householders should remain vigilant.

Lauterbach too would remain vigilant. There was a European across the room, sitting in the corner, waiting idly, fanning himself with his hat and staring into space, watching the dust motes dancing. The other hand twitched rhythmically. In the sunlight, Lauterbach could see the unmistakable shape of a small bullet, a little jewel of lead, copper and brass, that he tumbled compulsively, base over tip, like a Muslim telling his beads. He had been at the restaurant last night and the draper's shop this morning. When Lauterbach had come out of the cigar shop and abruptly turned left, he had nearly cannoned into him standing in a side street. From his complexion, he was fresh out East, maybe English. He wore old lady's lavender cologne and only the English did that. The smell of it had transported him immediately back to his childhood – Lauterbach, six years old, sniffing a bar of Old English Lavender soap sent by a distant Manchester cousin.

Lauterbach shook his freshly-barbered head and turned to the Batavian papers. Von Muecke had created a sensation a few months before by himself appearing, out of the blue, in Padang in that old schooner he had stolen from the Cocos-Keeling islands, dodging lurking British gunboats and sailing off again to war like a romantic pirate of old. There was continued Dutch speculation as to his whereabouts and intentions. Lauterbach thanked his lucky stars he had missed that happy reunification or he would now be god-knows-where on the open sea, in a leaky boat, directly under the orders of von Muecke, probably planning the lone conquest of Australia. He himself had dropped from the headlines but the belated arrival of Diehn and the others in Padang was being made much of. Most of them had tried to march into town and ended up in hospital. Diehn would be furious to have a much smaller price set on his head by the British than Lauterbach.

“Oh. Herr Thompson. You poor lamb. You are so brave and so young.”

Lauterbach swiftly raised the newspaper like an armoured visor. It was the sound of cooing female enthusiasm that he had got to know so well in Padang and, though it had served him well enough initially, he was now heartily sickened by it. For Thompson it was all new and wonderful – food, drink, smart clothes, sexual initiation. You couldn't blame the boy. He lowered the newssheet and peered cautiously over the edge like a submariner. Middle-aged merchants' wives, faces hot and shiny with maternal lust, weevily enough hard tack for a boy to cut his teeth on but, once he had got his foot in their door, they would have more tender daughters for him back at the house.

“Tell me, my dear young boy, how you fought that tiger with nothing but your bare hands and your young courage and what happened when you were attacked by cannibals with blowpipes, like you told that man from the papers.”

Lauterbach snorted behind the personal column and forced his eyes to concentrate on the print. A young Batavian gentleman was looking for partners for tennis mixed doubles. A respectable, “almost white”, lady – fresh from the country – offered breast-feeding. Thompson cleared his throat and began his heavily embroidered yarn in a new, deep, confident, manly voice. Lauterbach smiled to himself. The lad was growing up, giving them what they wanted to hear. Better yet he had given him an idea.

“All his fellow countrymen will be saddened to hear that Oberleutnant Lauterbach, ex-officer of the
Emden
, is suffering from a bad attack of the fever as a result of the exertions made during his recent famous crossing of Sumatra. As soon as his condition permits, he plans a journey into the Sumatra highlands for his health. Let us all wish him a pleasant journey.”

It appeared in the Padang German-language paper the next day. But Lauterbach was very far from lying on his sickbed. Instead, he was in the rear seat of the publisher's car, bucking and roaring along the motor road south to Bengkulu, where he would pick up the steamer to Batavia, the capital, and arrive before the news of his disappearance could reach a British ship. Arrived at the harbour, on the passenger manifest, there was, of course, no Lauterbach. But there was a portly and goatee-wearing Belgian, Eugene Gilbert by name, a gentleman who declared his luggage mysteriously and irritatingly lost at Bengkulu and was therefore treated by the shipping line with the greatest consideration and generosity. Monsieur Gilbert spent a great deal of his time on deck and was particularly interested in the British warships that cruised around the Sunda Straits, the narrow waterway that divides Sumatra and Java, always waving a friendly greeting to the sailors on board and executing a sort of exuberant and abbreviated nautical hornpipe to their departing sterns.

Chapter Nine

Batavia was the most modern and cosmopolitan city in South East Asia, at least the European quarter, Weltevreden, was. The native suburbs boiled in tropical heat and disease and steeped in foul water, but Weltevreden spoke of the optimism of pre-war years with bright new trams gliding along the tree-lined avenues and sparkling canals built by the Dutch to bring coolness and soothing motion to their crisp, white, residential areas. In the commercial quarter, the stiff, narrow fronts of Amsterdam had been preserved but out here in the suburbs there was enough space for the Dutch
Landhaus
to take their place. Fat dwellings sat securely in large grounds, pruned and watered by copious gardeners who fought a relentless battle against tropical exuberance, just as their owners waged war on the manic disorder of the whole, vast colonial archipelago.

Lauterbach moved into the sprawled gingerbread villa of one of the
Etappe
merchants where the man lived with his pale wife and three big-boned daughters but he spent much of his own time in the gentlemanly atmosphere of the
Harmonie
, the famous club on the corner of the noisesome main boulevard where carriages, horsed and horseless, rattled up and down around the clock. In the early 19th century, the
Harmonie
had been completed by Stamford Raffles, under the British interregnum, so that Dutch and British should mix socially and they were still doing it. Its cool white pillars and luxurious clubrooms were one of the wonders of the East, panelled with every exotic oriental wood and paved with foot-smoothed flagstones that called softly but insistently to Lauterbach. The bar, dotted with potted palms, bore that sense of unchanging and well-patinated perfection otherwise found only in heaven. Oleaginous Javanese boys, with headcloths like flames, pattered deferentially among the drinkers while, in the leather armchairs, lounged the men who ruled this great swarming empire of millions of brown souls, mostly red-faced and foolish but certainly not evil. And mostly Lauterbach liked them as they did him and they brought him shelter from the burden of cosmic loneliness that nested like ice in his breast. Of an evening, his entrance roused a cheer and calls for a drink for good old Juli-bumm from German and Dutchman alike. Even some of the British joined in so that he preferred to sit in the main concourse rather than what was known jocularly as “the German lines.”

This morning he settled himself opposite the great tented lap of Potter, an English planter with a big spread of rubber up in Probolingo. Potter's ghostly palour was odd for a man whose occupation should involve an active outdoor life but probably told sad truths about his style of management. It was only about eleven but there was already a sprinkling of dedicated drinkers round the room, complaining as always about the heat and the servants.

“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.