Rogue Raider (22 page)

“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.

Kessel grinned in cheerful innocence and swerved to avoid a buffalo cart, honking after the event. For him this was all a big joke. “We sent one of our traders along with that passport to book a passage in the name of Pieter Blaamo, direct to Hong Kong, non-stop and a load of luggage with that name has been delivered to the ship. At the last minute, our man will use the ticket for one of his company employees so it's no loss. It doesn't have to go on anyone's balance sheet – sorry.” He bit his tongue and took his eyes off the road to perform facial melodrama for Lauterbach who had eyes for nothing
but
the road. “You see? They've already got me thinking like some blasted bureaucrat. Anyway, with a bit of luck the Brits and the Japs've crammed the ship with their own men and arranged a reception offshore. They won't be worrying about sailings from Surabaya now. They'll be thinking how to spend the reward money. Teach them a lesson. As we say here in Java, it's not over till someone bangs the big gong. So when you get to Surabaya our chaps will look after you. Since they're all interned they've got nothing else to do but sit around polishing their navigational instruments.”

They advanced thunderously down the centre of the road in a plume of dust, most local forms of life scattering to either side. Only chickens were stupid enough to avoid a car by running
down
the road instead of across it. At this hour, the flow of the traffic was against them into the heart of the city, a mix of pedestrians, bicycles and lumbering carts that occasionally threatened to prevent their passage entirely. As it thickened, Kessel cursed and honked but did not slow, merely reduced the margin of safety. “Mustn't miss that train,” he urged, as if intending to smack into it and looked at his watch.

Through the windscreen, Lauterbach saw terrified faces and leaping bodies and closed his own eyes in desperate self-protection. With a great wrench of the wheel and a squeal of brakes, Kessel brought the vehicle to a skidding stop. The engine rumbled on in the silence.

“Quick. You've just got time.” He reached into the back seat, threw a tiny bag at Lauterbach who stood waif-like. “Run man, run. The train's about to leave.”

Tears in his eyes he turned and stumbled across gravel for the ticket office, slapped down money, slithered back the ticket and was pushed, blind, aboard by kind brown hands. A Javanese conductor led him to the first class compartment, indicated a reclining chair, bowed and withdrew, leaving him entirely alone in a luxury of leather, polished wood and crystal. He threw himself into it in misery.

Two beers later, he had revived a little. Of course, he suddenly realised, the chair was like those on the
Emden
and on his own ship before that and the attendant had packed him round with cushions as though he were a Meissen shepherdess likely to be broken in transit. One hand rested comfortably on the swollen money paunch, the other grasped the silken stem of the beer glass. Through the windows, it was suddenly a beautiful world.

The train hunched its shoulders and began the long, winding climb from the coastal heat to the cool uplands where copious rain and volcanic soils coaxed coffee, tea and other rich export crops from the slopes. It was this that had brought cold northerners here in the first place. Bananas and melons hung out over the narrow railway track like gold-embossed invitations to stay. Gorges crammed with wild forest scored the plantations, crossed, back and forth, by bridges that looked in the distance like matchstick models. Below them, on the plain, lay open fields where men and women, all slim and comely, smiled as they worked the rich grey mud and tiny children drove huge pacific buffalo that were the same size as the baleful tanks that would soon churn up the battlefields of Europe to raise a less happy crop. There is no green so intense and full of life as that of germinating rice shoots and Lauterbach let the colour wash over him like sunshine.

Soon they came to a wilder area of primeval forest and dark-stemmed bamboo where the Javanese lodged the humble gods that were important in their everyday lives. Here the villages were like islands in a green sea and the occasional felled trees lrose up like great beached vessels. Lauterbach glided effortlessly by, looking benignly down into their simple lives and moving on like some huge airborne albatross. When he raised his eyes, a range of great, conical volcanoes towered up into a blue sky, some smudged with smoke as before in Pagan, where, he imagined, the villagers were now wrestling with their Japanese grammar books. As he watched and sipped, an attendant came and knelt, polishing his soft civilian shoes, applying the polish with bare hands so that it became an act both of massage and of worship.

At the hill station of Bandung, they served him lunch, a thing of many small and delicious courses on a lacquer tray, fired with chilli and softened by luscious fruit. The waiter cleared and soothed and brought fresh coffee and a single beautiful orchid before he climbed down with his boxes at the next stop to return to Bandung by road and repeat his service the following day.

Yet another attendant appeared and showed the many unsuspected tricks the chair would yet perform, like some great wooden work of origami. All afternoon Lauterbach dozed in its extended, reswivelled comfort to the tympanic rattle and sway of the train and when darkness arrived, his contented cigar echoed the glow of the distant volcanoes and the chuffing engine until they drew into a station and stopped with a final clank and an extended sigh. Here they would all disembark and spend the night as at some medieval coaching inn.

This was the point at which the train from Surabaya to Batavia also stopped for the night and all the passngers, their minds pointing in opposite directions, slept in the same mock-Germanic Valhalla of a hotel, while the trains nested nose-to-tail outside. Lauterbach bathed by hissing lamplight under great beams, throwing gouts of water over his body with a giant's wooden ladel. What would he be tonight at dinner, Belgian, Dutch, French?

“German,” said the woman across the table with a smile. “I would have said you were German not Dutch.” At this altitude the evening was quite fresh. The Dutch often built their houses with huge baronial fireplaces, even in the torrid swamps – being perhaps mentally unable to arrange furniture in a room without a hearth – but here it was a functional item and great logs crackled companionably, pouring out heat and nostalgic forest scents. Outside, moonbeams ghosted through pine trees like pale wolves.

Lauterbach mimed astonishment over the mashed potatoes, sticking firmly to Dutch. “From my childhood perhaps. I spent many holidays there, in Germany, just across the border.” He had constructed an elaborate tale of being the representative of a Dutch printing house travelling on business, specialising in visiting cards. No alas, he had no card on him having left all in his room. To more important things. She had huge dark eyes and golden skin. After three hundred years in the islands, many of the Dutch had blood spiced with exotic infusions. It had been a while since he had touched female flesh and several glasses of wine and dramatic firelight lent enchantment.

“You are travelling alone, madam?” His expression disapproved of her loneliness. Her loneliness was an affliction he could dispel.

She nodded. “I am joining my husband in Weltevreden. He is,” she locked her gaze with his “considerably older than myself and finds it hard to manage alone. My name is Anna.” The door had opened a crack. Lauterbach thrust his foot into it.

“He is a very lucky man, Anna. I should think any man would find it hard to manage without you. You should not have to travel alone.” There. He had smacked his stake down on the table. He watched the dice roll behind her eyes.

“What a sweet thing to say.” She tossed her hair. “I must be careful. I am unused to gallantry. It might sweep me off my feet. But I hope you are not telling me what to do.”

He smirked, rounded, hot eyes openly ogling. “I think you already know what to do.”

She swilled wine, the nasty, flavourless Sumatran vintage that the waiter had thrust on them. Her glugging oesophagus was delightfully physical, showed his number had come up, she was gulping down the bait with the wine. He was in.

He smirked and simpered, cooed and oleaginated. It ended, as it must, quite early in her room where, it was alleged, she had a little brandy that would help two overtired travellers to sleep. She poured, offered, sprawled back, all rustling invitation, on the bed and then suddenly, as he rose to accept that invitation, her face and eyes hardened.

“And now, if you please,” she snapped, “you will give me two hundred dollars or I shall call the manager and accuse you of forcing your way in here and attacking me. Be warned,” she swigged brandy and hardened further, “I can be very convincing. Everyone says so. With a little effort on my part, it can even become a case of rape. I could rip the dress. I don't want to. It's a very good dress.”

Lauterbach was poleaxed. He sank back on his chair, mouth gaping, puffing air. Like all men, it had occasionally happened to him in the past that some women were immune to his charm. He could live with that. Not everyone had good taste. But this was a matter where, for the first time, something important was really impugned. There were many paths to shame and fortune but this one she had chosen was just not nice. The world, it seemed, was a worse place than even he had imagined. He was genuinely shocked. Bitterness flooded his simple heart. Like most habitual liars, he expected other people to be honest.

“Tell me,” he said deadpan, “If I pay you the money do I still get what I came here for?”

She threw back her head and laughed, a nice laugh, a little girl laugh. “My dear, you put it so sweetly. You are a man who keeps his eye on the ball. I think I might manage that. We shall see.”

“The husband,” he was stalling for time, trying to think, “in Weltevreden, all that was a lie?”

“Oh he's real enough.” She turned and looked at him with the blatant self-confidence of a dog looking at a bone. “Now where's the money?”

“The money,” he articulated carefully, “Is in my room. Would you like me to go and get it?”

She laughed again but this time it had a little more grit stirred into it and she did not bother to have a facial expression. “Like hell. We'll go together. You're not getting out of my sight till I get paid. I deserve it for those corny lines you made me listen to all evening. Jesus.”

They set off, he leading, she staying close as a wart, down the long, creaking corridor, lined with anonymous doors. This should have been a stirring place, dark, full of flickering shadows from the oil lamps, redolent of hot, adulterous, nocturnal paddings and pantings. Now he felt like a five year old being marched to school by a grim-faced mother. In the sudden silence, his unruly digestion gurgled and throbbed like steam in an old boiler.

“My God!” She poked him in the ribs. “Is that you? You should get that seen to.”

He would try to lure her into one of the communal rooms where she could not make a scene, sit down with the men, wait her out. He could not afford to do anything that would attract attention to himself. If the worst came to the worst he would have to pay.

“Oh no you don't. Try to slip away and I scream the place down right now. I have a very loud scream. Everyone says so.”

There was a loud click and one of the doors was flung wide, casting a great square of light on the floor, framing the huge black shadow of a superman. The shape moved slowly out into the corridor and turned so that the light fell on its face.

“Potter!”

“Lauterbach!”

Potter strode forward, hand extended. “What are you doing here? Everyone said you were in Hong Kong.” He peered. “Ah. I see you've met Anna. Virtually a fixture on the Surabaya line. She has her own summer timetable, our Anna. Don't worry she doesn't speak English.”

“What? Who?” Lauterbach stood becalmed, eyes popping.

Potter seized Anna by both shoulders and pecked her familiarly on the cheek, turned her round in avuncular fashion and smacked her bottom in fluent Dutch. “Off you go my dear. There's lots more in the bar just waiting for you. Big, rich planters.”

She pouted, hissed something that was a curse maybe in low Javanese but left with a little regretful flutter of the fingers and, as she turned the corner, was laughing.

“Hope I didn't spoil anything. I take it you didn't … weren't going to …? Thought not. She doesn't usually deliver. That's not her style. Everyone knows Anna. Been at it for years, the dear old thing. She's getting a little heavy in the thigh these days but can still pull the less discriminating punter. Sometimes …” he leaned forward confidingly, “she pulls the old Indian rape trick, you know, screams the place down, but only when she's met a real stinker.”