Rogue Raider (2 page)

“It's this way.” He leaned forward, his voice growling and booming over their boyish piping “You know I have my two months' reserve duty to do, same as every year?”

Yes, yes, they nodded. “And if a war starts, they can assign me anywhere?” Yes, yes. “But if I'm already serving on a ship they automatically make me part of that crew? Well, if it comes to a war, I can't think of a better berth than the
Emden
, or better, braver mates to serve with …”

“Oh Juli-bumm …” Comradely tears started to their eyes for no heart is more sentimental than the caloused heart of a sailor, riven by a hundred reluctant farewells and with no second home to suborn its affections and Lauterbach knew that the constant presence of a disdainful sea and sky made men on ships huddle together against the cosmic chill.

… Softly … “So I wonder if maybe we can fix it that I start my reserve with you boys right here and now …? What do you think?”

“Oh Juli-bumm. Don't worry. We can fix it.” Hugs, manly choking. Their smooth, young faces lit up with pure joy. “Franz Josef can fix it. You know, the Kaiser's nephew. On the
Emden
, a technician looking after the torpedoes. A word with the admiral and he can fix
anything.
But there will be no war.” Still – a war – their eyes shone with bright excitement as they rolled the word round in their mouths. It would mean medals, bugles, cowboys and Indians, promotions … They pouted, “But we're all headed for Mexico on a dull official cruise, haven't you heard?” There could, after all, be no war. Other arrangements had already been made. “Have another little beer.”

It was pointless to argue. The young knew themselves to be confidently immortal while the fat man had attained a terrible awareness of the fragility of human flesh. A fat man has limited options in this world, reduced to the choice between embodying the virtue of joviality or the vice of greed. But Lauterbach, while he might slip in and out of either of these roles, could not make them permanently his own. In truth, he was horribly sensitive and as the years rolled by, he needed ever more flesh, piled up as a barrier against the world, just as he needed money and possessions to protect him from its bruising reality. Among the wildly gesturing boys, he sat back provisionally satisfied, like a man who had spent all day working his way against the wind and finally made it to a safe port. On the
Emden
he would be safe. Over the swimming table, Schulz caught his eye and a strange knowledge flowed between them. The big man stroked his moustache and smirked boldly into Schulz's crazed grey eyes.

“Of course,” he said, staring, half-challenging, half-sharing cynical insight, “I suppose joining the
Emden
would mean a quiet war. After all, they won't risk the Kaiser's nephew's life on anything too exciting. But one thing I've found from all my years in the Eastern seas.” He laid a hand melodramatically on his heart and used the sort of flattery he normally used on women. ”It's comrades that count more than excitement. Just great comrades like you fine boys.”

“Oh Juli-bumm.” They simpered, bathed in rugged mutual respect. Another little beer. Another little beer. A toast to Julius Lauterbach, the best mate a bloke ever had.

Schulz coughed and tittered. Lauterbach. There was a cheap little song that had gone round the world by squeeze-box. In English it ran “Oh where oh where has my little dog gone …” In German it was “In Lauterbach I lost my sock. / I won't be going back there. / But if I went to Lauterbach, / I'd once more have a pair there.”

Schulz guffawed and lah-lahed secretly under his breath. “Socks,” he sniggered to no one in particular and stared gleefully down at his boots. Lauterbach raised his glass and smiled peacefully. He had heard it all before. It had no power to upset him. Safe. On the
Emden
, he was safe.

“One for our friend over there,” he smirked with fat generosity, pointing with fingers like pork sausages. “The navy must not totally forget the army.” It was young von Guerard's round anyway. In such circumstances, generosity cost nothing.

The wind shifted again and the sweet stink of the new brewery doused them in its catholic blessing. It did not smell that different from the dungheap really.

Julius Lauterbach was thirty-seven years old and life – thus far – had been good to him. He would have been the first to admit it. He was a Baltic German, born within sight of Mecklenburg Bay – the same name as that fancy sanatorium up in the Laoshan hills. Bloody mock … No, wait, that was someone else.

A Baltic twang still salted his speech. Six years of military school at Lichterfelde had demonstrated beyond all doubt, to himself and the world, his unsuitability for the intended career in the army or the law. He could still feel the knuckles of his Latin master as they pummeled his shaved, schoolboy skull. “Examinations, Lauterbach, Are-Not-For-You. I fear that when the time comes you will have to resit your post-mortem.”

The death of his father, which had seemed at first to cast something of a shadow over the preparations for his eighteenth birthday, had been the making of him. He was free. Not the army then, not the law, not even the navy, but the merchant marine! In those days, it was still all sail. Sixteen months back and forth around the Horn at two dollars a month had hardened his hands and coarsened his speech. He had a pet monkey and a parrot. To be the complete sailor, all he needed was a wooden leg. His bourgeois family had withdrawn into shocked silence. Over the years, he had swopped ships and women, soft berths and hard, got a mate's ticket, switched astutely to the new thing of steam, gone three times round the world and settled in as quartermaster on the China run of the big smug steamers of the Hamburg–America line. In the East, everything was big but the people and Lauterbach had begun to absorb that bigness into his own unshakeable flesh as quiet peculation lined his pockets from the company's coffers. There were hurricanes and mountains, elephants and snakes. Once, six of them had wrestled a huge python back into its cage in a darkened cargo hold in a force nine gale, having stupefied it first with goat. At twenty-nine, finally, he was master of his own ship, the
Gouverneur Jaeschke
, a trim vessel with a gaping Chinese crew that he ruled with a rod of iron as he worked it round every port and up and down every river in the Orient. Shanghai, Tsingtao, Manila, Vladivostok and Hongkong were his regular fare.

He liked the Chinese and learned the simplicities of survival from them, that to die was always bad, to live much better and to live with money best of all. He quietly turned a blind eye to their little scams that hurt only the customs service or the money-changers, deliberately did not notice the odd, too-intelligent, new face among the crew when the nationalist forces were on the move. But he was prepared to pay them out a good thrashing too, with his own hands, often the best-appreciated currency on the coast. He prided himself that a German thrashing was worth three times a Britisher's. While they feared him, they knew that if the worst came to the worst he would never simply tip their bodies over the side, like so many European captains, for burial at sea, so that they would end up as hungry ghosts. He could be relied upon to take them to a port where they could be properly buried and decently furnished with burned paper copies of the goods they would need on the other side. So he toiled with them, called them dogs and whores' sons in fluent pidgin, fought them with his fists and gambled with them, drank them under the table in a hundred, filthy dockside bars and nursed them when they were sick. If they did not exactly love him, they at least respected him as a man to be reckoned with and wreathed him round with silken myth. He was the product of a drunken union between a mad sailor and a witch who had assumed the form of a fox. If roused to wrath he could turn into a bear. He had been seen to eat iron rivets, chomping them down with his great teeth. There was even a Chinese version of the Lauterbach song whose darker linguistic points he did not seek to elucidate. In those years he had crushed life's grape against his palate and happily spat out the pips. He was young and glad to be free and touched the earth very lightly for such a heavy man.

In the East any white man became upper class, regardless of his origins. He had stayed at the best hotels, dined at the best restaurants and drunk the most subtle vintages. In Shanghai, Lauterbach had sipped pink gins with Kitchener in the International Club and wore a gold ring on his finger given by the Emperor of China, or sometimes it was the other way around. There had been girls – bony Chinese with bodies like bicycle frames, voluptuous, hairy-backed Russians down on their luck. Once, in a casino in Shanghai, he had won a pair of blonde Swedish twins with huge pink breasts like blancmanges and extraordinarily complex underwear you needed a chart to fathom. They had drunk and sung and danced and made love and finally he had recited to them Swedish poetry, remembered from Baltic childhood, and made them cry. To the crash of waves and the throb of mighty engines, Lauterbach had obliged many a lady passenger on the slow Pacific swell, always a generous and unfussy lover, fervent but discreet, so that they usually came back for more of his tasty beef on the bone. As a sailor, he had always prided himself on his bedside manner and his couplings were as efficient and dispassionate as a naval docking procedure. A fat moustache and a touch of gold braid proved an irresistible aphrodisiac to colonial wives who appreciated his discretion which, in fact, rested on his inability to remember any of their names or faces so that he was frequently astonished to wake and see that of a complete stranger on the pillow beside him. But he always retained an encyclopedic memory of the feel of their thighs as they gripped his comforting bulk and scrambled giggling to his summit. The top drawer of his dresser contained a pile of the conventional gold watches, most of them too tight for him to wear, given by unimaginative but grateful women. He made them the small change of friendship to departing Chinese crew, inscrutable but litigious. Sometimes, he knew, these ran a sweepstake on his exploits, especially on the dull Shanghai stretch. Long faces or grins at breakfast showed who had hit the Lauterbach jackpot on the last night. And towards the end of a run, Ah Ping, the steward, had a way of damping down his boilers or opening his throttle wide to guide his efforts towards the desired total. “You take this boi' egg. You need keep up your strength. I think you get old.” Or. “You only get porridge today. No boi' egg. Need rest yourself. You do too much.” Sometimes the Lauterbach torpedo was so unpredictably trigger-haired, he thought they must be slipping him other stuff, more than boy eggs or even girl eggs, in the food.

But now war was coming and it was time to batten down the hatches and get under cover. Regulations obliged Lauterbach to serve two months a year in the naval reserve and normally it was a welcome break from the routine of restless motion. They gave him a new uniform, lots of fancy saluting, there was riding, hiking, swimming and banging about with guns. Usually it was here in Tsingtao where the cold inshore winds spared you the humid horror of a summer in Shanghai. You could afford to rent a room, lay in some wine, fix up a comfortable mistress at long-term rates. The onboard food was awful but often you could eat at the Cafe Floessel, run by a fat Duesseldorf lady with a roving eye, and the only really bad part was being under someone else's orders again, corseted by childish discipline and the starched collar of regulations. It was as good as a holiday. Now Russia would put an end to all that.

Not just Russia, naturally – who would probably just support the Serbs against the Austrians as always. The real enemy in Europe would be the French if the lazy British could be kept out. But the most immediate danger out here in the East was the bustling Japanese. Maybe they would fight the Russians again. Last time, half the Russian fleet had run away to hide from them in Tsingtao. No fools, when they had looked to the West for models, the Japanese had based their army on that of the Germans and their fleet on the British Navy. But their spanking new warships were already arrogantly jostling those of the Western powers in the harbour of Shanghai and the real goal for Japan would be the precious city of Tsingtao itself. Tsingtao and all the German colonies of the Pacific – that was what they would want to join the grown-up nations of the world and there was precious little to stop them. A cruise to Mexico? He thought not. The whole world and all the certainties of this new twentieth century were about to blow up in their faces. Not just a war, a world war. Time to get under cover.

Lauterbach's rickshaw rattled over the railway tracks set into the cobbles and wheeled to a halt in a great arc. It was a comfortingly nautical way to stop. The sweat-soaked rickshaw man slumped on the shafts in a theatrical demonstration of exhaustion and despair as Lauterbach heaved himself creaking down and looked up at his new ship, the harbour water sucking and slapping at her sides while she gently peed bilge from a rust-rounded hole. Sailors were rubbing down and repainting her sunburned nose. All about were stalls selling food, cheap souvenirs, and great heaped crates snarling with German military and technical reference numbers. Around them, hundreds quacked and shrieked in dialects of Chinese, carried things up, carried things away – maybe the same things – scraped pans, smashed bottles, performed unspeakable acts of mutilation on screaming pigs. A woman was throwing greasy water over a wailing child that danced with rage. China had always been a bad place to have a headache and there was no shortage of headaches this morning. Debauched and stubbly sailors, newly mobilised with kit bags on their shoulders, took queasy leave of their local amours in tones of tragedy or relief to the chink of Mexican dollars. Lauterbach's civilian uniform, provoking neither respect nor salutes, bestowed blessed invisibility. Having newly sacrificed beard and moustache to naval discipline, he seemed, even to himself, like an impostor.