Rogue Raider (31 page)

The boarding was sloppily done, not as Lauterbach would have handled it. There had been no checking of lists against names and engine-room crew had been allowed to stay at their posts. He had planned for this. Above the scalding boilers he had constructed a nest shielded by metal plates from below, so that it looked like a mere continuation of the boiler itself. It was as hot as Hades but bearable for short periods and he shoehorned himself in, gulped water from a store laid to hand, slapped a soaked towel over his head and settled to sweat it out. Half an hour limped by. Then his foe appeared below, looking suspiciously in all directions, opened doors, checked lockers and moved with painful slowness down the aisle between the throbbing machines. He stared the crew boldly in the face, stopping them at their work and turning their heads with his hands as if they were pots he was thinking of buying. None of them – Lauterbach was sure – would give him away by a word or an upward glance. They were too depressed to look anywhere but at their feet. Lavender man came to rest right beneath the roaring boiler and glanced up at it as if he could see Lauterbach up there, smoking like a kipper, and fanned himself aggravatingly with his hat while Lauterbach stiffened and felt the sweat gush down his chest to drip sizzling on the hot metal. His guts gurgled like the boiler pipes around him and he strangled a fart behind his sphincter and thought he could almost smell the lavender but such a thing was – surely – impossible over the reeking smoke and oil. Gazing down, he felt rage and hatred and then a sudden stab of pity, like his dyspepsia, at the incipient soft baldness of the man's crown, normally concealed by the hat and now revealed in all its babylike vulnerability. Then the man reached into his pocket and pulled out the bullet that he began working through his fingers like an infant sucking on a joyless dummy. Suddenly, Lauterbach was assailed by dizziness. He blinked, shook his head and swam in fumes and fear and, finally, when it seemed he would topple at his foe's feet, the man passed on. Lauterbach stayed a few more minutes and emerged light with terror and dehydration. The British vessel returned to station, leaving only a skeleton crew in occupation. His enemy was gone.

They spent five bleak days in Kirkwall. Lauterbach looked out at the grey joyless town built of cold granite and felt even more depressed. To be hanged in this place would be terrible indeed. They were questioned every day by a thin-faced British officer in a duffle-coat as gales howled around the ship. If they were kept much longer, there was real danger that the auxiliary, complete with lavender man, would return to this, its home port, for resupply and then Lauterbach would swing at the yardarm. He had to dig deep into his childhood memories of Sweden to give a plausible account of himself and his family and it ended up sounding like another version of imagined Milwaukee. Fortunately the interpreter was incompetent and his own halting command of the language passed muster. The nastiest British trick was swooping down on them in the early morning and shouting them awake in German to test their response. On Lauterbach this was wasted. He responded to no human language at that hour. Then they started on about the bacon again. Lauterbach snarled back. What in God's name did he know of bacon? He was a stoker. One, he realised suddenly, with awkward, lilly-white hands so he put them behind his back but again the British did not notice. After five days they were given leave to go and take their bacon with them. That night, they were hauled over by a German submarine that raked them with its searchlights and questioned them through a loud-hailer. Satisfied of their neutrality it vanished back into the depths. Finally, they arrived in toytown Copenhagen that crackled with a layer of silver ice and the whole crew sobbed with sated homesickness. And just as suddenly, in the chill air, Lauterbach froze solid.

He had been driven round the world and, in an instant, could move no more, like a donkey that will suddenly endure any amount of beating and just digs in its heels, lays back its ears and refuses to budge. Unafraid of the cudgel, it will die first. He checked into the best hotel in town and went to bed, summoning occasional meals to his room. The thick curtains were pulled over views of the frozen harbour and untrammelled heat puffed and hissed into the room through clanking radiators. Lauterbach lay under the flounced eiderdown and stared at the intricate moulded ceiling for hours, days. Or he would break out in a cold sweat like a corpse on a marble slab and lie naked, listening to the boiling and rumbling of his guts as they merged with the sounds of the heating. The fragile gangplank that connected him to the rest of the world had collapsed and sunk. He was all at sea and the ice was forminh again over his head. In the carpeted room was not Asian time, or American time but Lauterbach time, dictated by the rhythms and needs of his own body. It was the time of the sickness experience, when the whole world shrinks down to your own flesh and each breath requires a conscious act of volition and each minute is felt in every quivering nerve, not assumed and lived
through.
To forget to breathe is to die. He moved between bath and bed and no further. Sometimes he cried but did not know why and when he gazed in the mirror he saw a succession of tear-stained strangers staring back with eyes devoid of self-knowledge. Was he an apple or a pear? He did not know. His identity was a pen that he had left on a table, a dropped cufflink, a sock abandoned under a bed or perhaps by a stream and he had simply lost himself and did not know where to look. He could not remember what name he had signed in the register downstairs for the months of imposture had brought no flash of self-knowledge about the core of his being, as it often does. On the fifth day, he reached into his cummerbund pocket and counted his money, again. There were the familiar Chinese bedsheets, the crisp dollars, the arrogant pounds, the clenched and curlicued Reichshmarks spread out on the bed. He smoothed them and smelled them as they soothed him with their innocence and he fell asleep with his nose buried in their slim solidity and woke to find them soaked in his drool and his mouth dry from snoring. That afternoon he washed, shaved and went to the German consulate. He had rebirthed himself but had been born an orphan.

“Officially, you don't exist,” they told him. “You have no passport, no right to be here. Our records mention no Lauterbach. Nothing from New York. Go away or we will have you arrested.”

He walked through the limpid sunlight, as light as a ghost, the air sucked out of him, leaving no shadow. On the street was a woman handing out biblical tracts to all and sundry. He passed her three times and she offered him nothing. He was invisible. He headed for the offices of the Hamburg America Line, his old employer.

“Of course we know you,” they said, gathering round, smiling, handshaking, offering a glass, pouring substance and sensation back into him. “Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tsingtao. Good old Lauterbach.” The clerks were called in, the manager came down from his high office. His boots refilled with comforting solidity, his swimming senses returned. There followed aquavit, beer, more aquavit, a pickled salmon meal in the steam of potatoes in a restaurant down by the port.

“Here's a note to the Naval Attache. He'll sort you out.”

He had danced and boasted and proposed toasts and awoken dry-mouthed beside a mousy-haired, dog-faced woman whom he did not remember and who spoke no language known to Man but demanded fish for breakfast entirely in gesture. He was alive.

On Sunday morning he took the little pot-bellied ferry to Warnemuende and, as the boat puttered towards land, he was surprised to see people on the beach. It was not the holiday season and the sea, for locals, was exclusively a place of work. But nobody worked on a Sunday. Here there was no gangplank and he took off his shoes and socks and clambered down onto the honest wet sand, enjoying the worms of sludge sliding up between his toes, a childhood memory. Germany. He had never been very good with the pomposity of abstractions. He was rooted again, earthed. A loud cheer rang out and he looked up to see a little brass band fighting down the beach and striking up a ragged rhythm.

“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.”

“Three cheers,” they shouted. “Three cheers for Lauterbach, the hero.”

They rushed up, good-natured, pig-faced people with fair hair and heaved him, grinning and grunting, onto their strong, fat, pink, shoulders and ran him around the beach. At least this time, they weren't making him wear a turban and someone, somewhere, finally owed him a thousand dollars.

It was a bitter November day in Bremen and a stiff wind whipped around the empty flats of the shipyard before rushing out over the sea to smack the waves into life. Even though it was a festive occasion, there was a chill, funereal feel in the air, for it was a season for past memories not future hopes.

All the worthies from the city of Emden were there in the stands, clothed in deepest black, astrakhan-collared and well upholstered, fortified by hip flasks and heavy breakfasts as at a graveside. Their women were with them with dead foxes wrapped round their necks and hands thrust into fur gloves. Below, stood the workers in their rough serge and best caps, grimly determined to make the most of a rare day off work. The launch of a ship was always losing a daughter more than gaining a son, though the order book was full enough at present to make up the heavy loss of shipping in the endless war. She was a light cruiser whose principal distinguishing feature was a great, clumsy Iron Cross welded to either side of the bow and her name was picked out in white against the dark grey –
Emden II.
There was a long, bombastic speech with enough hot air to fill a Zeppelin. At the back stood two naval officers, one pared and thin, the other bulky, a comic pairing from the motion pictures.

“So Lauterbach. You have had a good war” stated von Muecke, eyes facing ahead, not without an edge of bitterness. “Out of all of us you seem to have come off best. So you are now a great hero? Who would have thought it?”

“Well, that is what the Kaiser says, so I suppose it must be so. It came out of the blue. They wrote about me in the newspapers and the Kaiser reads the newspapers. You might say I am a hero by imperial decree.” Lauterbach twitched his sleeve with its extra bands of gold. He was not just a hero now but also a Lieutenant-Commander of the Reserve. Von Muecke had stuck at Commander. The difference in rank should be noticed. They eyed each other's rows of medals and ribbons cautiously, like boys appraising each other's conker collection. Lauterbach had more crosses than a Catholic altar.

“You have lost weight,” observed von Muecke. “You have been on recent active service?” The slimmer waist was from the absence of the cummerbund, replaced by a more conventional nest-egg in non-inflationary gold, stowed under the floorboards at home.

“I have just got back from the Baltic with my First Commercial Protection Half-Flotilla,” declared Lauterbach. “When I was in Hamburg, I asked to be posted back East so, out of spite or miscomprehension, they sent me to the Baltic – east after a fashion.” Not the east of Rosa. A pang passed through his stomach. God this Western world was grey. But Rosa would never do here, a Eurasian wife, a ‘Chink', to be sneered at as inferior by tight-mouthed locals. He sighed. The loss of the East was not, for him, merely a matter of imperial pride. He felt it in his flesh. Yet, he had compromised and already put down a deposit on a serviceable Hamburg fiancee. He even had a marmalade cat.

“What is that, ‘Commercial Protection'? Is it anything to do with the Seagoing Circus?” Von Muecke seemed to sneer but then whenever he smiled, he sneered. It was not his fault. His face was just made that way. Ask a shark to smile. But he looked older; more lined and the skin had an odd, variegated look, more like an old crocodile. Perhaps that was from the terrible sunburn they had all suffered. In fact, now he thought of it, von Muecke resembled one of those Iron Men, wooden carvings of warriors set up all over Germany, so that the patriotic could pay good money to knock nails into them and raise cash for the war by this odd fetishism. He also gave off a smell of stale laundry but then so did many people nowadays. Lauterbach sniffed unwillingly. He fished out a cheroot and lit it. In its turn, it tasted of old tea-leaves and floor-sweepings.

“What they call the Seagoing Circus is von Rosenberg's operation, an amateur thing of mine-laying and -clearing. We're different, the mystery ships. You know? You don't know? The mystery ships are chamaeleons. We pretend to be merchant vessels to lure in enemy submarines but actually we are heavily armed and as they close in to attack on the surface, we sink them. We got three in the past year alone.”

“It does not sound entirely honourable.”

Lauterbach bristled. “Honourable or not, it's bloody dangerous. My ship just got blown to bits by British destroyers and I sustained wounds that were accounted honourable enough by the Kaiser.” He shifted stiffly. His leg was playing up. He had broken it falling down the stairs to get to the boats but a wound was a wound as surely as one Reichsmark was worth another. “And you?”

“There was a lot of trouble over my report concerning the
Ayesha.
It was all politics. I am a naval officer in the service of his country and politics are not my concern. I would not lie. But they did not like the fact that I mentioned the treacherous collusion of our Turkish allies in the attacks on my men in the desert. You may have noticed my books?” He looked at Lauterbach with a small hope.

Indeed he had. Two best-sellers, all about von Muecke, snapped up by blind patriots and star-struck little boys. The vanity of authors. He was now a famous writer about the war and prouder of what he had written than what he had actually done. His life had become an object for him to possess. Lauterbach saw in a flash that he, himself, had never really cared about
things.
True, he liked money but that was for its sheer ethereal beauty, that it could magically transform into anything. When he was last in Berlin, von Muecke had been giving rousing, ticket-only, lectures on the
Emden
and
Ayesha
to packed houses and talked of conferring immortality on the dead heroes by his own deathless prose, proof enough that it was his own eternity he was concerned with. Lauterbach eyed his thick, non-regulation overcoat. He, too, had made a pretty penny, one way or another, out of the war and should not complain.