Rogue Raider (23 page)

“But Potter what are you doing here?” Lauterbach, bridling, whimpering, gushed boyish gratitude and looked more closely. This was a Potter reborn, not supine and downtrodden as in Batavia but energetic and confident, taking command, a man who still hoped for something from the world. Come to think of it, allowing for the pallid light, he wasn't even pale any more. In fact, he was as brown as a berry.

“Butterflies, old man.” His eyes shone with passion. “Don't you know? Really? I should have thought … This is the best spot in the whole of Java for butterflies. I've been out chasing them for days. There was a report that the Rafflesia had been sighted so naturally I just dropped everything, grabbed my net and ran. Terribly rare. Very exciting. As we speak butterfly buffs from all over Java are converging on this spot. By the end of the week, there won't be a room to be had even for ready money. They'll be pitching tents and Anna will be working her sweet little tush off.”

They adjourned to the bar. Potter introduced some skinny fellow lepidopterists who drank till late, recounting former butterflying triumphs and disappointments all over the archipelago, argued on the finer points of butterfly anatomy and grew tearful over sketches of the Rafflesia executed on beermats. Lauterbach pulled Potter aside and shouted confidentially above the barroom roar.

“Listen here, Potter. Can I ask a favour? Please don't tell anyone you saw me here. It's very important.”

Potter winked back knowingly, tapped the side of his blob of a nose, squinted still more. “Ah, like that is it? Don't worry old man. I wouldn't dream of it. Married man myself. I shan't say a dicky bird about Anna and all, though I think there's perhaps more to it than that.”

“You would do this for me though I am German?”

Potter considered him impassively, whisky clenched in his fist. “You're also a member of my club,” he said firmly, like a man adopting the steep and rocky path of a difficult morality. He brightened and hitched up his trousers. “Anyway, if we see the Rafflesia who on earth would remember
you
?”

“Got you!” A heavy hand fell on Lauterbach's shoulder and he jumped like a scalded cat. He turned, heart thumping, and looked into a face with deep blue eyes, cropped blond hair and a skin lined and cracked with laughter lines.

“Engelhardt!”

“Lauter— Oops. Sorry. Mustn't say that word. Good to see you old friend.” They both laughed as they hugged. “Come on. Let's get you off this railway station sharpish and under cover. We'll cut through to the harbour and get straight out to the ship.

It was getting dark, the hour where in Europe people would be heading for hearth and home and the world closing down. But in Java that simply meant the night shift was getting into its stride. Barrows were being wheeled into position for the dispensing of chicken and soup and ice chips and crackers and stalls laid out for sarongs and shirts and hats and knickers, along every street in town. People were pumping up hissing lamps and firing charcoal and impaling meat onto skewers. In the teeming throng, no one heeded the two white men threading their way down to the water's edge and the little skiff tied up to the muddy pole of a house. As they climbed aboard Engelhardt looked at his watch.

“Six twenty-eight,” He announced, holding up his finger. “Listen.” Lauterbach was not sure what he was to listen to – the birds, the waves, the distant sounds of the market or the plaintive call to prayer from a dozen mosques – and then suddenly the background rasping of a million crickets switched into prominence as it was turned off, as though by a single mighty hand. Engelhardt smirked.

“Every evening. Regular as clockwork. Beats me how they do it. You might want to call that the hand of God.”

Captain Engelhardt had been in Dutch waters when war was declared and opted for internment in Surabaya rather than fall foul of the British navy lurking offshore. Making the best of a bad job, he had settled in on his ship the
Widukind
and imported his dumpling of a wife to add a pleasing dash of domesticity. Washing and potted plants dotted and shaded the searing foredeck and a strict regime that was wifely rather than nautical kept the old ship spotless amidst the filth and garbage of the reedy backwater to which she had been shifted, linked to the shore by a thin gangplank that was ceremonially lifted at sunset as the German flag was lowered. Since the cabins were too hot for human habitation at this season, Frau Engelhardt had caused a large rectangular tent to sprout on the main deck that caught every waft of breeze and they lived an airy windblown existence behind ghostly sheets of muslin. Meanwhile Engelhardt himself grew orchids, read books, smoked his pipe. He made a small but steady income letting out the cabins to merchants for the secure storage of material too fragile and precious for the normal local godowns.

“When my retirement comes,” he quipped, secateurs and watering can in hand, “I shall have to work much harder.”

It was the same picture of contentment that had been haunting Lauterbach's thoughts all over Java, the same music played in a dozen different keys, of a simple satiety, the love of a good woman, a life lived fully in the present and secure in its own inherent joy, not one pitching towards some vague and hoped-for future. They sat amidst a mass of hanging, petally flowers whose perfume warred successfully against the outside miasma, drank iced beer, crunched Javanese snacks and reminisced. Lauterbach eased the rest from his limbs by dangling his foot over the rail and staring at the twinkling of the city lights.

“You remember, Lauterbach, that Christmas we got drunk in Hawaii and stole an ornamental turkey from the Iolani royal palace for our dinner?”

“… And it was so tough we had to use a woodsaw to carve it.”

“What about the time in Tsingtao, at that party, we convinced a Taiwanese merchant that the Governor would be prepared to swap his wife for a bicycle, so that he wheeled one round to the front door of the Residence the next day and tried to take her away?”

“… And when he complained to us we explained it was because the bicycle was second-hand.”

“… And the wife nearly new.”

They laughed, clinked glasses, capped one tale with another. Frau Engelhardt sat and smiled and darned ancient socks. She had heard it all before. Let the boys have their fun, their remembrance of what seemed happy only in retrospect. All around them, ships sloshed through the thick, muddy water in darkness. Navigational lights were considered an unnecessary luxury. The gloom hid the tears that had started to Lauterbach's eyes. Nostalgia made him lonely, more proof, as it was, of the inevitable passing of all things. And in the dark a million frogs came out to mock him, shouting “What? What? What?” like red-faced British colonels.

He moved on. He moved east. He was now Lars Renquist, a Swedish traveller, rendered blond in eyebrows, beard and hair by the tender and tittering application of Frau Engelhardt's bleach. The transformation had lent an air of charade to his departure but in his cramped suitcase he now had a compass, a package of papers marked unconvincingly “Secret despatches” in big black letters and a small, sinister revolver given by Engelhardt, a sign, after all, that things were getting serious. The plan was to sail to Manado in North Sulawesi, then try to hop a boat through to Manila where he could disappear beneath the surface of the heavy American traffic to the US, changing identity as circumstances required. His name, his appearance had begun to waver, to become unsure and unfixed in his own mind. When he looked in the mirror he no longer knew unthinkingly what face would be looking back at him, goaty Gilbert, moon-faced Blaamo or scraped Renquist.

The little
Pynacker Hordyke
steamed east in a pall of greasy smoke. The deck-class passengers were fuzzy-haired Ambonese troops bound for New Guinea surrounded by their hushed wives and children together with a mix of Chinese peddlars whose cardboard boxes of merchandise were stacked about them and served as their nightime beds. Cabin-class were British and German with the Dutch and lone Lars Renquist forming an uneasy buffer between them, like mice between two cats.

The food was disgusting, mostly rice and chicken, served day after day in an enduring sameness that robbed meals of their normal shipbound function as markers of time. And at meals the war was an endless source of friction, conversations pitched deliberately loud so that neighbours and enemies should overhear and take offence – rowing by hearsay. It was irresistible.

“Whatever our feelings – as neutrals – about the war,” Renquist ventured, “ It cannot be denied that some of the men of the
Emden
warrant our respect as sailors.” There was a pause.

“Captain von Mueller is a true gentleman of the sea,” confirmed the Germans. “He brought great honour to our nation through his daring, intelligence and sense of discipline.”

“But wasn't there another officer, a fine figure of a man if my memory serves me well, who distinguished himself for his extreme bravery … ?”

“Ah,” said one of the Brits. “You mean von Muecke of the
Ayesha?
A true seadog in the old British tradition, rallying his men in adversity and bringing them safely to port despite the odds. Mark my words, there must be a drop of English blood in those veins somewhere.”

Renquist was nonplussed. “But wasn't there yet another man who went on and did still greater things. Now let me see, what was his name? He escaped from Singapore, crossed Sumatra, brought his men safely to Batavia in defiance of all obstacles.”

There was another silence.

“Hang on,” said one of the Dutch, stolidly, a pastor. “I know who you mean. I was in Padang when he passed through. It was in all the papers and I actually met the fellow. He was called Diehne. He had the most fantastic tale to tell of having been abandoned by some wretched officer upriver in Sumatra, a man who was running away from prison, I think. Anyway this Diehne was certainly a man of parts. Did you know the British actually put a price on his head? I could see why they wouldn't want a man like that getting back to the front. I say. It seems we all respect these men
as
men. Why don't we drink a toast – all of us regardless of our nation – to their courage?”

There was a grudging, gruffly Adam's appled, murmur of assent. “Hear, hear.” “Good show.” They scraped back their chairs, rose and chinked glasses solemnly, swallowing each others' pride. Lauterbach drank, smirking fixedly, to von Mueller – which was all right – von Muecke – which was not – and Diehne. That nearly choked him.

The simmering old port of Makassar where naked boys dived in the water to pluck the tourists' small coins from the seabed, on to Manado, home of the industrious Minahasa people, Potter-pale and Chinese-featured. Lauterbach landed in the early morning calm, gripping his small luggage. It was a pretty town sheltered behind a volcanic island, ancient Portuguese ruins swamped in hibiscus and bougainvillea, the port still small and crystal-watered. It smelt of tar, salt and the sea. The Dutch lived in cool, old-fashioned thatch houses shaded by willowy palms and everywhere, soft grass was underfoot. In a hut by the water, they tried to feed him fruit bat but he dined, instead, in a cool breeze on fresh-grilled prawns and nut-flavoured bread leavened with the yeast of coconut water. On all sides plantations flourished, dotted with little churches and schools. The other unmistakable sign of the power of the Christian faith here was the universal presence of chubby dogs.

Disorder and squalour are the measure of a port's importance and by such yardsticks this was a most unimportant port. Still, there was no shortage of loungers and spectators. Lauterbach picked his man and sidled up.

“Mindanao?” he hissed like one offering dirty postcards for sale.

The man laughed, shook his head and repeated the query to those around. They laughed too.

“No Mindanao. All boats here are busy. Anyway, the Dutch do not allow us to go to Mindanao. All traffic has to go to Batavia for control.” He spat onto the decking.

“This is not,” Lauterbach articulated carefully, “a trading journey. I simply wish to travel there for important family reasons.”

“No Mindanao. You ask Master of the Sea, a white man like yourself.” He pointed vaguely to the end of the jetty and there, indeed, stood a white man with his back to him and wearing the Mindanao daytime formal dress of cotton pyjamas. Lauterbach picked his way past nets and small canoes and a pile of trussed crabs who glared at him through their eyestalks and, as he neared his goal, the man turned round and was not a European at all but an albino, pink-eyed Malay beneath a broad-brimmed hat and white lashes.

“Mindanao? We are not permitted to sail to Mindanao. You must go back to Batavia and take a ship there. If we go to Mindanao they call us smugglers and confiscate our vessels.”

Lauterbach knew that such dogmatic, black and white impossibility could only be the first in a long series of negotiating positions. It was hard to have confidence in someone dressed in the striped outfit of a convict. But he knew the ways of the East and hooked up an overturned bucket with one foot, sat, got out his cigarettes and settled to talk.

He was not Dutch, he stressed. He was Swedish. This was an informal trip, a thing between friends. He merely wished to go across to Mindanao with no merchandise and no great luggage. It was a matter of no great general interest, absolutely of no importance to the Dutch and he had money. The word worked its usual magic. The man seemed to look at him for the first time. There was, it now seemed, one possibility. They could not take him but there was nothing to stop him buying a boat, hiring a crew and doing as he pleased. It just so happened that the Master of the Sea had a friend who …

The boat was about fifteen feet long, old but sound, with classic lines and a single outrigger and a simple sail of some woven plant fibre. The timbers gaped arthritically since the owner had not troubled over much about paint or caulking. It lay on the beach like one of those huge trees washed down from the inner forests, a silver-grey Leviathan, transmuted by the elements into something akin to stone. Lauterbach ran his hand over her bleached and salty flank and thought distractedly of the racehorses he had sent to the bottom in his
Emden
days.