Rogue Raider (27 page)

On a whim, he picked up the telephone and held it to his ear. He had asked for the line to be disconnected, but there came an instant fury of clicks and clatterings down the wire. Lauterbach went directly to the bathroom, climbed up on the seat and fished in the cistern. The water that stuck to his hand was thick and green with slime. Whoever had been here had not had a pee, then, or at least not flushed like a gentleman. He withdrew a key, the key to his safety deposit at the bank, and good householder that he was, clanked the chain to empty the tank and refill it with fresh water. It was time to move his assets west. The dying jangle of the mechanism blended confusingly into a sound from outside where the lift abruptly lurched and rattled back off to the ground floor. Lauterbach pricked his ears and heard it thud to a halt five floors down. He left the flat swiftly, turned the key on the deadlock and hurried down the stairs. On the ground floor below him the grill scraped shut and the lift began to climb back up, groaning and creaking. As he passed through the lobby and hailed a rickshaw, he could have sworn he smelled lavender on the air.

He realised too late that he had been imprudent and that it would cost him his life. The plan had been to stay the night in the Concordia Club dining on fat German sausage. But he had drunk perhaps too much beer, spoken his native tongue too emphatically and inhaled too much German self-confidence in the very cigar smoke. His high-ceilinged room on the first floor lay empty in the early hours of the morning as he had he wandered out from the smoke-filled bar onto the Bund in the moonlight to take the air. A refreshing rain had scrubbed it of its usual acrid tang and lent a delicate sheen to the embankment. The tranquility of the spot, the German cosiness of the surroundings – everything had lulled his senses into woolly content. He had lit a cigarette, as those seeking fresh air often do, and wandered slowly towards the steel ribs of Gardener bridge to stare at the implacable river and the dying lights of the city and suddenly realised that, on the broad, paved avenue, he was very alone.

Wait. No. He was
not
alone. Suddenly there were three men who had been lurking in the black shadows under the trees, coming purposefully towards him in long raincoats, hands in their pockets. He turned. Three more were crossing over behind him. He was cut off. He started to run back towards the Concordia, his unsure feet echoing on the stark cobbles. A late car wobbled over the iron bridge and whined slowly towards them in low gear. He ducked down and used it as a shield between himself and the second group who were dithering across the road. A sudden crack and a bullet starred the side window. The driver accelerated away, his face a white frightened blob under brilliantined hair in the moonlight. In Shanghai you did not get involved in other people's quarrels. Fear trilled through his stomach. In a civilian it would have caused paralysis but now the conditioned reflexes of training cut in. There was only one thing to be done, an ancient naval manoeuvre. Crouching low, Lauterbach ran straight at the closest group and rammed them, barged the larger two to the ground and reeled at a glancing blow from a blackjack or some other kind of cudgel as the third, smaller figure struck out at him and connected on the thigh. The other three were shouting now and closing in fast. His only escape was the river, fast-flowing at the ebb tide. Lauterbach swung himself up onto the stone parapet under a hissing gas lamp like many a festive drunk before him but his leg lay dead from the blow, and he hesitated, looking down sweatily into the turbid water wondering whether to jump. The little figure made the decision for him, leaping up to grab at his good leg, unbalancing him so that they both tumbled forward. He just had time to recognise Katsura's terrified face and then the filthy Huangpoh boiled over his eyes and ears and the next he knew he was gasping and striking out for the far shore, fighting the panic of the cold water and the bullets that were fired off randomly into obscurity. Getting a grip on himself, he began to tread water and breathe deeply and floated gently downstream in darkness until he accosted an astonished sampan.

“Taxi!” he called in his most patrician tones. “You takee German ship, chop-chop.” He clambered aboard and gushed filthy water on all sides. The boatman stared, open-mouthed. “Chop-chop,” snapped Lauterbach sitting down primly by the stern as if this were a totally regular means of hiring a taxi.

The French concession in Shanghai was one of the more relaxed. It financed itself largely through the pleasures of the flesh and many of the girls who worked in the Lane of Lingering Happiness housed in the cheap tenements around the Avenue Joffre. The German concession lay just north of it around Kraetkestrasse, a place of offices and counting-houses, and the familiarity of the name, the same as his old ship, leapt at Lauterbach as he swung down from the tram and picked his way carefully over the rails. His thigh still ached.

The German consul, Herr Wolf, was a fussy little man after whom no ships or roads were likely ever to be named and he operated from a darkly panelled office that concentrated down the sticky Shanghai heat and made it totally intolerable. Thick carpet kept noise and humidity in. The only dry thing was the rasping tick of a heavy wallclock in a marble case. the shape of the Brandenburg gate. Lauterbach appraised it charitably. A clock in an office always added a touch of class. They sat across a desk with great bow legs like his grandmother's sideboard.

Herr Wolf had a cold. “Lauterbach?” he sniffed. There was a shaving rash under his left ear. “Don't know you do I? You must make an appointment, I'm afraid. I have an urgent meeting across town.” He snorted tiredly into a handkerchief and looked at the clock as if expecting it to confirm his story but the golf bag leaning against his chair spoke louder.

Lauterbach sighed, unintimidated by this sheep in wolf's clothing. “Herr Wolf. I have with me certain secret documents from our Batavia legation that I have carried at great personal risk and I am eager to disembarrass myself of them before they fall into the wrong hands.” He pulled the packet from his side-pocket and pushed it over the desk so that it came to rest on the blotter where Herr Wolf sat and looked at it appalled, careful not to touch. To touch would be to assume responsibility.

“This is really most irregular.” He reached for the phone, thought better of it, sneezed, and put his hands in his lap. Then he reached for a pencil and poked at the despatches as at an unclean thing. “They are not, I note, actually addressed to me. How am I to know they were intended for myself and not another?”

Lauterbach shrugged and stared at the Emperor's portrait nailed to the wall. There was something odd about it. “No doubt the first letter contains information about myself and the content of the other letters, if you care to look at it.”

“What? Have you read these papers?” Wolf was becoming as angry as his rash and he scratched at it in rage. “That too is most improper and an offence under German law.” He sulked and breathed heavily through his mouth. Lauterbach realised what it was with the portrait. A house lizard had got behind it and was rocking up and down so that the imperial moustache twitched as though in patrician distaste. Lauterbach had confidently expected a warm and enthusiastic welcome,
Etappe
housing, a fake passport or two, more money. This would not do at all. Wolf sniffed back snot.

“You will have to come back tomorrow. I cannot possibly deal with such an extraordinary matter now.” He pushed the letters back with his hankie and made the face of a man straining against constipation.

“And what if the British shoot me dead in the interim?” Lauterbach shoved them back yet again, stuck out his jaw. “They have already made one attempt on my life.”

“In that case do not come back. Atchoo!” Witty. Very. The man was a fool and this was a waste of time. No matter. Lauterbach knew his way around this town and had more than one string to his bow. There was a squeal of tyres and a furious honking outside. That would be another of the strings. Without another word, he stood up and walked out, leaving Wolf looking down stupidly at the letters.

Rosa was Eurasian and of good Shanghai patrician family which is to say that her father was an English trader while her mother had formerly worked in the entertainment business but was now redeemed as a devotee of bridge and lawn tennis. Rosa had clearly got her legs from her mother. Lauterbach looked at her fondly as she sat smoking in her little yellow convertible outside the German consulate. A knot of tangled emotions stirred in him. Was this love? The word was difficult. It was at least affectionate lust that stirred in his breast and elsewhere. He walked over and knocked on the window.

“Darling!” Her whole face lit up. She leaned across, wound down the window and kissed him briskly on the lips. He opened the door and slid in beside her. She was about thirty-five, dark, with big, brown, almond eyes and those tiny even little teeth only Asians can have. She exuded warm feral odours. The Lauterbach torpedo armed itself as he slid a hand over her shoulders. He should have brought the traditional flowers – what Schwabe termed “a bundle of plant sex organs.” Women liked that sort of thing.

“Thank you for coming.”

She laughed. “So formal darling. Would you like to have it off?” Shock showed on his face. She laughed again. “The
roof
, you idiot. Shall we have the roof off?”

“Better not.” He settled back into his seat. “As I explained on the phone, I need to hide out for a few days. I wondered about that big old house of yours in the country? Do you still have it by any chance?”

She started the engine and shifted into gear, the slit in her skirt showing a haunch of appetising pale thigh. “No problem. These days you can't give away an old pile like that. Anyway,” she laughed and looked at him fondly, “I'd do anything for an old shipmate.”

They had met on the old
Staatsekretaer
a few years back and one thing had led to … a repetition of that one thing throughout the journey to their great mutual pleasure. He had written to her from the camp in Singapore and she had sent a reply of such anatomical intimacy that the shocked censor had let all future letters through unopened. Rosa was an independent woman who ran her own club, The Wild West, in the lively Foochow district. Having noted the relatively high pay of American doughboys, she had set up a cosy bar to cater specifically for them, American drinks and music, a decor involving table lamps in the form of the Statue of Liberty and girls who might or might not be nice but were always clean and had no holes in their underwear.

They bowled along beside the Huangpo river, heading out for the expansive countryside otherwise known as China. Lauterbach kept an eye out for anyone who might be following them but once they were outside the foreign concessions, vehicles were few and they were virtually alone on the dry dirt road. After a while the lanes lost their obsession with straight lines and settled to a meandering pattern between parched fields, as though their course had been fixed by a man chasing a pig. Ten miles further on, they took a right turn and drove slowly down a rutted track to a big placid house, transplanted from the Surrey hills and hidden in pine trees. Ancient gardeners bowed deferentially as they crunched past. They seemed older than the trees.

“It looks just the same.”

“Of course, darling. We sometimes use it for weekend parties, politicians and such but it's the quiet season.” She squeezed his hand. “Just us.”

The next two days passed in a golden haze of the senses. They ate, drank, made love and then, one night, he said.very deliberately, “I want you to do something for me.”

Rosa burst into tears. “Sorry,” she sobbed. “I've been waiting for you to say that. I know this can't last, that we have to have our fun while we can and not take things too seriously. We both knew that from the start and I'm not complaining.” He said nothing, just hugged her in the dark till his arms ached and she fell fitfully asleep. She was a grand girl and of his ‘ladyfriends' she was closest to being a proper
friend.
But his mind tossed and turned in the night. He quarried her sleeping silence for proofs of his own failings. What was it he really wanted? Freedom or security or simply that constant alternation that is the sailor's life? Sailing the seas thinking of home or sitting at home missing the sea? Caring for someone made you strong but it also made you weak since terrible things could happen to them. Caring about anything was dangerous. He had intended to ask her to sell the flat for him but now he could not. He would have to leave it as an unredeemed pledge that he would be back after the war. No, wait. The property market was at its peak. He would quietly ask someone else to sell it and then, if he returned, go back into the market at a lower price. Surely, there was no harm in that? Rosa would never know. He sighed. He wanted to be happy but feared that God had simply made him sad. With the clarity of vision that comes in the dark, he realised that his lovelife was organised on the same model as his looting forrays on the
Emden
– a dispassionate inventory, followed by a ruthless ransacking that met his immediate needs, followed by moving on. He lay awake brooding muzzily until the early morning grey crept through the frilly curtains. Just as he fell asleep, Rosa awoke and drove back in the first light to the city, leaving him alone. He awoke sad and with a terrible taste in his mouth. Perhaps it was the taste of melty love but more likely just a tongue parched from too much snoring.

Two days later she was there again, smiling, makeup bright and cheerful, dressed in a fresh new two-piece, the car full of parcels.

“Here you are darling. Everything you wanted.” They went giggling up to the bedroom where Lauterbach excitedly tried on his brand new uniform of a sailmaker's mate, first class, in the US navy. A few weeks before, to crown an evening of hard socialising, petty officer William Johnson had engaged in mild fisticuffs at The Wild West and so lost his wallet, passport and other documents as well as two teeth. The papers had been adjusted to fit Lauterbach. Last, she gave him an envelope containing a ticket aboard the
SS Mongolia
, an American-registered Pacific mailboat, sailing for San Francisco via Nagasaki and Yokohama. The froth of US war fever had now subsided as swiftly as it had boiled up and there was no longer an immediate risk of a declaration of hostilities and the sailing was in two days' time. Rosa did not cry again and wore a constant bright smile that was more frightening to Lauterbach than tears. And that night she broke a long-standing house rule and made love to a man who wore the uniform of the US navy.