Rogue Raider (19 page)

After five sunburnt days they reached Pulu Lawan, home to a sultan of great piety and power, who turned out to be an unassuming little man who lived in a simple thatched house much like those of his little subjects. A Lilliputian air reigned over the whole town and the Germans felt themselves to be clumsy well-natured giants who put their feet through bamboo floors, crashed into low doorways and snapped any piece of furniture they sat on. Even the svelte Malay paddlers seemed huge. By some mystery a shipment of American denim overalls, cut to fit children, had recently arrived up-river and made a sensation in the town so that all persons of fashion and quality were dressed in them.

The etiquette in the palace was long and tedious, made yet more irksome by the fact that the sultan was quite innocent of the very existence of Germany, the fact of a war or the nature of a warship so that every explanation required another ten. But his smallness and Lauterbach's girth spoke to each other and the little man hugged him ecstatically and offered the use of the rest house, built to Dutch dimensions, for the night.

“Only you must be careful.” He wagged his finger “The last person to stay there was eaten by grandfather …”

Lauterbach laughed and dismissed the words, thinking he must have misunderstood owing to the odd local accent. Could cannibalism still be endemic in this backjungle and tolerated as a mere eccentricity in an endearing elderly relative – and all this so close to a Dutch station? Surely not. But when they arrived at the clean, decent building, escorted by most of the town, the guardian pointed out with great pride deep clawmarks shredding one end of the verandah and the hole ripped in the sidescreen through which a tiger had entered to tear apart and eat the last guest. “A local man of the lower class only. Fortunately,” he comforted. Lauterbach remembered then that the Malays often referred to the tiger with the respect name of “Grandfather.” Members of the crowd stepped forward and showed wounds they too had incurred from the tigers of the area who not only lurked in the forest but came into their homes and bore away their children. One displayed a brown back scored with pink slashes like pork crackling. But what had these people done? Had they shot the tigers? They all shook their heads and looked shocked. That would bring great bad luck. There was only one thing to do, give the tiger gifts, address it most respectfully and ask it to leave. Now Lauterbach joined Diehn in regretting the lack of a gun.

“Lauterbach. Lauterbach.” He was being carried around on the shoulders of a pack of Indians. Very black skin. Very white teeth. The teeth became long and sprouted pointed incisors and the faces bunched and whorled into those of striped tigers and roared at him. He woke with a start, sweat flowing down his chest. There was something rattling at the door.

“Lauterbach. Lauterbach.”

If it spoke it could not be a tiger. The voice came from out there in the moonlight, where the tigers lived. It was still dark. His internal clock said it was about two in the morning and no time for social calls. He rose, wrapped his sarong tighter and peered out through the shutters. A glittering eye peered back at him.

“Oberleutnant Lauterbach? I am Distict Officer Filet. My man at Pulu Mudra sent word that you were an escaped German officer and travelling in this direction. Although Holland is neutral I have always had many German friends and I should like to help you.”

The barricades of furniture, erected against tigers, were dragged away from the doorway. Sleeping forms were slapped back to wakefulness. Schoenberg stood terrified in a corner and dithered as Lauterbach flung wide the door and grandly beckoned Filet into what was, after all, his own house. He entered, looked around at the soldierly disorder and smiled, hooked a foot round a chair and dragged it forward to sit and look down on the men still on the floor. As he sat, he let out a long sigh.

“I always wondered why my parents sighed when they sat down,” he smiled. “Now I am old enough to know.” He rubbed sore legs. Filet was a dapper little man in his early fifties, blond moustache, cropped hair, wearing a travel-stained colonial uniform. The sun had dried and creased his skin as though from too much squinting into a bright light but his movements were spare and tight so that he exuded a cool sense of control. “I have chased you all the way from Pulu Mudra in my launch. Thing is, you can carry on the way you are but frankly you'll find it pretty tough going. Not a regular route you see. What I suggest is you all come back to PM with me and we can try to get you the steamer connection to Padang. If not, I invent some emergency that takes me up to Siak by boat and from there you can save a good ten days' trekking time over the mountains to Padang. Much easier going too. What do you think? Got any gin there?”

A glass was pressed into his hand that he sank in one swallow, followed by a belch. Perhaps he used to wonder why his parents did that too. Diehn was already there fussing, sticking his chin out and his nose into things that did not concern him.

“Impossible!” he snorted. “Why go back? We have come too far to go back now. There is the question of morale amongst the men. To turn back would prove fatal.”

It was true. It had been Lauterbach's intention to get them quickly beyond the point of no return and he thought he had done it. Young Thompson was lying there, spent, in a fever. He had eaten nothing all day. But then there was also the awkward matter of man-eating tigers already licking their chops at the thought of Lauterbach and there was the chance of cutting ten days off that damned trek if they went back with Filet. He could not see himself hauling his bulk up sheer rockfaces by his fingernails in this stinking climate. With the District Officer on their side, they should have no more annoying local problems. He would make their ways smooth, a doddle.

“I absolutely agree,” he nodded gravely. “We must at all costs press on. But … there is poor young Thompson there to consider. I can neither commit him to such a course nor abandon him to fend for himself. An officer's first duty is to his men. I shall return to PM with him and take my chances. It is a matter of honour. The rest of you must of course go on.”

They collapsed into argument. No, no he could not make such a sacrifice. This was not the moment for solitary heroics. But Lauterbach was immovable in his virtue and finally it was agreed that Schoenberg would accompany them so that he should not entirely lack for adult company. As they strode off towards the river the darkness reverberated with the roar of a hungry tiger, away up there in the hills. Bold Lauterbach pushed his way to the front and led down the path, apparently heedless of danger, leaving Thompson to bring up the rear. After many years in the East, he knew as a sure and certain fact that tigers lying in ambush always went for the last in a line of men.

PM had not improved greatly in the few days they had been away but with Filet as their host, it offered soft beds and beer. Thompson gathered strength. The steamer connection to Padang was unsure and a glance at the passenger lists revealed a sudden and inexplicable rise in the proportion of unattached English ‘traders', come from Singapore, unexpectedly flooding into this area at the time of year when there was no trade to speak of – and asking questions about strangers. Ah no. Siak it would have to be then.

“There is the matter of administrative costs,” mused Filet over lamplit dinner. “This is not a rich district you see and I can't just take it into my head to wander off to Siak, which is outside my area, in the launch without due cause. The paperwork would be hell. The commissioner has an eye for these things and once he gets his teeth into administrative costs … A nice little riot in the market there, with me assisting, is the sort of thing we need.” He reached absent-mindedly for another of beer. Several had already been taken in the course of a long, slow, bibulous evening. It slipped from his grasp, smashed on the table edge as he unthinkingly lunged for it.

“Damn and blast!” He had a nasty, oozing cut and a big grin on his face. “There we are then,” licking fresh blood. “A badly cut finger risking turning poisonous and on my account-signing hand too, rendering me unfit for duty. The only hospital is at Siak. QED.”

Siak did not exactly bustle but at least it twitched with intermittant commercial and government activity. It was basically the usual collection of wooden huts stood on poles out over the mud, but had, in addition, a church, several stores and two miles of navigable road that had encouraged the importation, by a wealthy Chinese, of a single motor car. Above all, it swarmed with children and when Lauterbach looked on the local ladies, waving to him bare-breasted from the riverside he could see why. Thompson was back on his feet, staring goggle-eyed. He would have to arrange something for the lad.

They settled into one of the eating houses by the jetty, forking in fried rice in token fashion, while Filet went off to have his finger dressed and do the usual administrative rounds. He arrived back a couple of hours later, flushed and with his wound elaborately bandaged into a boxer's hand in token of alibi, demanding beer, with two grinning native policemen in tow.

“Now then,” he sat and sighed, flung his hat wearily on the table. “Let me explain. The DO for here is not happy. The fact is he's from too near the German border and doesn't greatly care for your chaps, Lauterbach. Up this end of the Indies most people are scared to death of upsetting the British in case they just walk in one day and take over and then we're all out of a job. But he'll turn a blind eye as long as you move on straight away. So
these
two,” he indicated the policemen, “just happen to be here from the next district along and have agreed to take you back with them to Tratabula where the DO, my old friend Dahler, will take care of you. He's German-born you see. If I were you I'd get out of town fast.”

And so it was. There was to be no escape from walking across Sumatra. They trekked every day from five in the morning till ten, then rested until the heat cooled off and set out again from four till ten at night. In the morning, they waded through steam, in the evening through swooping swallows. Around them everything smelled of rot and decay. The policemen, heavily laden as they were, streaked away and would pause, polite and uncomplaining, to wait for them at every junction of the path or river crossing. Whoever had done the calculations of time from one village to another had used supermen like these. Four days' march stretched into over a week, then two. Whenever the policemen were asked how far they had yet to go they would smile, make a limp stone-throwing gesture and say “little bit yet.” They lived on fruit bought at the roadside and rice begged from villagers, slept where they could and tried not to give way to despair.

“Lauterbach, what will you do when we get to Padang?” Schoenberg did not usually ask questions like that. It was one of the things that made him an acceptable travelling companion.

“I will have a bath, a shave, drink a beer and have a woman. I contemplate the prospect with abated breadth.”

“No, no.” Schoenberg frowning, shaking his head. “I don't mean that. I mean will you stay there? I know the others are planning to settle in Padang or Batavia rather than risk trying to get back to Germany through the English fleet. For myself I am a trader in an international house. I can always get work wherever I am. Thompson can get another merchant ship, even a Dutch one. But you know there is talk of Holland coming into the war on the British side. If they do, they might just let me be or intern me in some nice house, or – if things go badly – put me in a prison again but you – I think – they would give back to the British to hang.”

“Thank you Schoenberg. You have given me pleasant thoughts to keep me going and make me walk faster.”

Dahler, when they finally arrived, was a bit of a disappointment, shrugging, unenthusiastic, steeped in tropical tropor, unwilling to make their problems his own. After a few days' rest on short rations they set off again.

If the previous stretch had once seemed difficult, it now became an easy stroll through a noble park compared to this. Here, the mountainous backbone of the island towered up to over three thousand steaming feet and they lay in its full rainshadow. Every day it poured down and sometimes the rain felt warm and sometimes cold but always there was just too much of it. The earth was slippery clay, the rocks brittle meringue, crumbling between their fingers and under their feet. Lethal precipices lay on either hand, tricking eyes full of water and sweat. The tracks had been made by small men and for small men so that the steps they had cut into the rocks on the really dangerous sections were too tight for clumsy Western feet and invited disaster while the branches they had cleared to their own head height poked Westerners in the eyes and stabbed them in the mouth. They were charged by buffalo, taunted by monkeys. The peak of felicity was to arrive trembling from fatigue in an astonished settlement and collapse as a giggling Malay sent his pet monkey scampering up into the trees to rain down coconuts on their heads. Scorpions and snakes were abundant but worst of all were the innumerable insects that made war on them day and night, mosquitoes, ticks and leeches, that burrowed and gorged on their flesh, leaving wounds that festered and turned septic. Soon they were afraid to take their boots off at night. Putting them back on bleeding, blistered feet was torture. Fungus sprouted rapidly between their toes and then swarmed all over them in a suppurating itch that could only be called ‘athlete's body.' Worse yet, from sleeping on old mats, in abandoned huts, they were invaded by lice that crabbed and devilled into their pubes, itching and flaring their private parts like chilli.

“Look, Lauterbach, look!” They had scrambled to the crest of another rise, knowing, as always, that there would be yet another on the other side, and another after that. But instead there was a view of two smoking volcanic cones, Merapi and Singgalang, an apron of land that dropped away before them with a distant view of sea and hazy city, with pointed-roofed Minang houses in between. Schoenberg and Thompson wept and hugged each other weakly. The guides grinned, “little bit further” and pointed to the countless miles ahead.