Jack of Spies

by David Downing

  “But …”

  “Let her tell you herself.” Ch’ing-lan rang her bell and told the answering girl to bring Hsu Mei-lien. “You will see how intelligent she is,” she told McColl while they waited.

  The girl who arrived was still a child, but every bit as bright as her cousin had said she was. She began in halting English, then switched to rapid-fire Shanghainese when Ch’ing-lan told her that McColl spoke that language. Her officer’s name was Burchert, and they’d been together the last three nights. If she had understood him correctly, he was an Oberleutnant on the Gneisenau. Once he was in the mood, she had started by saying how she’d seen the big English battleships in Shanghai and how brave she thought the Germans in Tsingtau were, to think of fighting them. But surely just sailing out to meet them would be foolhardy. They must have a better plan than that.

  And that was all she’d had to say—after that, nothing could stop him talking. As far as he was concerned, it was entirely about coal. They could keep their ships together if there was enough coal, while the English who were hunting them would have to split their fleet to search an ocean as wide as the Pacific. And that would give the Germans their chance, to destroy them a piece at a time. But only if they had the coal.

  “And where will they find it?” McColl wondered. “Did you ask him?”

  She gave him a derisive look. “I don’t ask questions,” she said. “I just let him talk. If I ask a question like that, he will suspect something.”

  “Yes. He probably would.” McColl smiled at her—she really was quite remarkable. But had she told him anything new and useful? The East Asia Squadron’s dependence on limited coal supplies seemed obvious enough, even for the British Admiralty. Where could the Germans find coal in the Pacific? If Japan entered a war against them, then not from the home islands or Formosa. Supplies from Australia and New Zealand would be cut off once war was declared. And the Germans would know that any colliers loading up in a time of deepening crisis would be followed. So they would have to build up stocks on various islands while peace continued—stocks that the Royal Navy would have to seek out and burn if and when a war broke out. “Anything else?” he asked her.

  “He says their gunners are better than the English.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” He smiled at the young girl. “Thank you.”

  Hsu Ch’ing-lan dismissed her. “Clever, yes?”

  “Very,” McColl agreed. Too clever to be working in a Tsingtau brothel. But then millions of Chinese people seemed to be short-changing themselves, biding their time. “How about the man with the flying machines? Has he booked another spanking?”

  “Pao-yu is seeing him tonight,” Hsu Ch’ing-lan told him.

  “Then I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  As it happened, he saw her sooner than that. It was still dark on the following morning when a hand shook his shoulder and he woke to the smell of her perfume.

  She said something in a dialect he didn’t understand, and the gaslight flared to life. More words, and a familiar-looking member of the Chinese hotel staff slipped out the door and closed it behind him.

  “This is a nice surprise,” McColl said, hauling himself up onto his elbows. She was wearing a long black coat over the usual dress.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, coldly. “Pao-yu—the girl who spanks the flying-machine man—has been arrested.”

  “When? Who by?” He swung himself out of bed and reached for his trousers.

  “The Germans, of course. Her questions must have made the man suspicious, and they took her to their police building. Last night.”

  “But they haven’t come to the Blue Dragon? I wonder why.”

  “Because the girl hasn’t told them anything. Not yet. A friend came to let me know they have her. She knows not to say anything, but she’s not as clever as my cousin—they’ll trick it out of her. So you must leave. There’s a train in an hour.”

  “Oh. Yes, I suppose I should.” He found himself wondering why she had come to warn him. “What about you?” he asked. “Will they arrest you?”

  She shrugged. “I shall say I know nothing. If you are gone, then all they have is guesses.”

  “I see.” And he did. She was afraid he would be caught, would implicate her, and that once the white folks had patched things up between them, she would be left as the scapegoat. Given the history of the last century, it was a reasonable enough assumption for a Chinese person to make. “Well, thank you. But what about the girl?”

  “I can probably buy her back, but I will need money.”

  “Ah.” He reached for his wallet on the bedside table, checked the contents, and handed her a wad of notes, thinking that he had now given her more than Cumming had given him. Some businessman.

  “This won’t be enough,” she said.

  “I’ll need the rest to pay my bill and reach Shanghai.”

  “All right,” she agreed reluctantly, stuffing the notes into a coat pocket and walking toward the door. When she turned with her hand on the knob, he half expected her to wish him luck, but all she said was, “Don’t miss the train.”

  He hurriedly crammed his few belongings into the battered suitcase, happily realized that there wasn’t time to return Great Expectations, and went to the door. It was only when he opened it that he heard the commotion downstairs. One voice—male, German, and coldly insistent—was demanding a room number; the other—Hsu Ch’ing-lan’s—was angrily protesting a client’s right to discretion. She was almost shouting, presumably for McColl’s benefit.

  He hesitated for a second, wondering whether he should just walk down and bluff it out. He decided against it. If he were arrested, the Germans could probably make a case against him, and some sort of punishment would doubtless follow. Best not to give them the chance.

  When he’d checked in a fortnight earlier, he had taken the precaution of exploring the hotel for possible exit routes. This had felt a touch histrionic at the time but now seemed pleasingly professional. Walking as quietly as he could, he headed down the long corridor toward the back staircase.

  He met no one in the corridor or on the stairs, but one of the Chinese staff was lounging in the kitchen doorway, a hint of a smile in his eyes. McColl fished some coins from his tip pocket, raised a finger to his lips for silence, and opened the door leading out into the backyard. He didn’t expect to find anyone stationed outside and wasn’t disappointed—the German authorities had obviously assumed that they would find him asleep in his bed.

  Hurrying across the yard and down the alley, he emerged onto Prinz Heinrich Strasse and into a bitter wind. The sky was lightening, and a Chinese man was working his way down the street, dousing the ornate gas lamps. The side of the station building was visible up ahead, but no smoke was rising above it—if Hsu Ch’ing-lan was right about the time of departure, he’d have at least forty-five minutes to wait.

  Which was obviously out of the question. He might as well give himself up as sit in the station for that long.

  Perhaps he could hide somewhere close by and then surreptitiously board the train at the moment of departure.

  This possibility sustained him until he reached the corner across from the station and leaned his head around for a view of the forecourt. There were several uniformed Germans in evidence, and one was looking straight at him. “Halt!” the man shouted.

  McColl’s first instinct, which he regretted a moment later, was to turn and run. Better a few months in jail than a bullet in the back, he thought as Prinz Heinrich Strasse stretched out before him, looking too much like a shooting range for comfort. But it was a bit late now to take a chance on his pursuers’ levelheadedness. He swerved off between two buildings and down the dark alley that divided them. He reckoned he had a fifty-meter start and must have run almost that far when a crossroads presented itself. Sparing a second to look back, he found the alley behind him still empty. But as he swung right, he heard shouts in the distance, which seemed to come from up ahead.

  Stayi
ng put seemed the better of two poor options. A doorway offered a few inches of shelter, enough to conceal his body if not his valise. Hearing German voices nearby rendered this problem more acute, and the notion of perching the suitcase on his head occurred to him just in time. As the Germans drew nearer, he stood there holding his breath, feeling more than a little ridiculous.

  He heard the feet stop some ten yards off, imagined the eyes looking this way and that.

  “Hanke probably imagined it,” one man said.

  “He is getting fond of the pipe,” a second man suggested.

  The first man laughed.

  “But we might as well go down to the end,” his companion decided. “Then work our way back around the block.”

  “Beats just standing here,” the first voice agreed. “Christ, it’s cold this morning. And no fucking breakfast.”

  His voice was fading, and McColl gingerly lowered his suitcase to the ground. He decided he would give them ten minutes to abandon this particular search and then make a run for it before the wider search got under way. But how? The train was out of the question, and God only knew how he’d get on a ship.

  He felt real anxiety for the first time. But it was not the prospect of captivity and consequent physical hardship that worried him so much as the personal failure it would represent. Getting caught now would likely destroy any future he might have had in Cumming’s organization.

  Was there any way he could go to ground in Tsingtau? Could he persuade Hsu Ch’ing-lan that finding him a bolt-hole was in her own best interests?

  Considering her circumstances, she was more likely to give him up.

  Still, the Chinese town seemed a better bet than the German, and once his ten minutes were up, he cautiously worked his way northward through the slowly waking streets. There were more people about now, but all of them were Chinese—the German police had vanished, their civilian counterparts still in bed.

  Once in the Chinese town, he bent his knees to disguise his height and let habit draw him toward the Blue Dragon. There was no sign of the usual doorkeeper, but there was a coal cart standing outside, its horse pawing absentmindedly at the cobbles with a front hoof.

  On its way into Tsingtau, McColl remembered, the train had stopped at a small station in the outskirts. Which couldn’t be more than three miles from here. Or four at the most.

  He was still weighing the pros and cons of theft and hire when the coal coolie emerged, a bowlegged Chinese man with a queue that reached down to his buttocks. McColl managed, with some difficulty, to explain what he wanted and then showed his incredulous audience the wad of German notes that should have paid his hotel bill. All doubts vanished from the coal-encrusted visage. Offered more money than he’d make in five years, the man bared his teeth in a grin of compliance and hustled McColl up onto the cart. After clambering up himself, he jerked the horse into motion with a tug of the woven-string reins.

  A real stroke of luck, McColl thought as they clattered down the slope toward the railway line and harbor. Directly ahead, the four funnels of either Scharnhorst or Gneisenau loomed above the long line of storehouses; away to the right, a few desultory puffs of smoke were rising from the vicinity of the rail station. Just a shunter, he hoped—surely his train couldn’t be leaving.

  As they approached the railway tracks, the coal coolie turned onto the parallel maintenance road the Germans had laid on the landward side and cajoled the horse to increase its pace. Soon they were almost flying along. Looking back, McColl could see no telltale smoke behind them. Perhaps he really would escape.

  One step at a time, he told himself—sooner or later the Germans were bound to pick up his trail. And if he were caught … well, truth be told, it probably wouldn’t be all that bad. He would be questioned at length and most likely put on trial. And then they would likely deport him, with as much publicity as they could manage. He might even serve a few months in prison. Which would be unpleasant, but he’d survive it. Jed and Mac would have to get the Maia back to London. And he would miss the chance to renew his acquaintance with Caitlin Hanley.

  Which was something he really wanted to do.

  She was still uppermost in his thoughts when the road abruptly degenerated, smooth asphalt giving way to ridged and rutted frozen mud. McColl clung to his seat, only too aware of the creaking axles, and prayed that neither would snap. His driver showed no inclination to slacken their pace—either the promise of riches had rendered him oblivious to everything else or the cart was a good deal stronger than it sounded. As the minutes went by and nothing more serious occurred than the loss of several coal sacks, McColl allowed himself to hope it was the latter.

  It felt as if they’d been traveling for hours, but his watch told him twenty-five minutes. If he hadn’t underestimated the distance to the next station, they should reach it in time—the prospect of the train steaming past them didn’t bear thinking about. What in heaven’s name would he do then? Start walking toward Shanghai?

  About ten minutes later, their track veered inland, away from the rails, but his chauffeur shrugged off his anxious questions. And sure enough, a few minutes more and they were back by the rails. By this time most of Tsingtau seemed behind them—they had to be nearly there.

  They were. The stop he remembered came into view as they rounded a bend, its single platform facing out across the bay. The station building wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Black Forest and had no need of the imperial flag that fluttered from its roof. European-style houses were clustered behind it, and beyond them was the famous brewery.

  The station was still two hundred yards ahead, but McColl ordered a halt—he had no desire to show up on a coal cart. The driver pulled on the reins, brought them to a stop, and anxiously held out a hand for payment. He seemed almost surprised to receive it, but McColl could hardly blame him—with his face still wreathed in coal dust, he didn’t seem a man accustomed to good fortune.

  McColl wished him good-bye and started walking. The station ahead, he now realized, looked worryingly deserted. He hoped to God that the morning train was scheduled to stop there, because he didn’t much fancy trying to flag the thing down.

  But he needn’t have worried. Several Chinese would-be travelers were sheltering from the wind on the far side of the building, and the German stationmaster was in his office, warming himself in front of a blazing coal fire. The man was consulting his pocketwatch when McColl appeared in his doorway, and as he snapped it shut, a whistle blew in the distance—the train was approaching.

  His face flushed with alarm when he saw McColl, who thought for a moment that the game was up. But it was only the usual German annoyance at lateness and the wrecking of schedules that might ensue. Concealing his relief, McColl asked if the train’s imminent arrival meant he should pay the guard, but that of course was against regulations, and the locomotive was hissing to a halt by the time the flustered official had written his ticket. “You’ll reach Tsinan at five,” the stationmaster told him. “And the connection to Pukow is at six.”

  Steeling himself, McColl walked out onto the platform, half expecting a posse of policemen to erupt from the two carriages. But there were none, only fifty or more Chinese men staring out of the open wagons hitched to the back of the coaches.

  He entered an almost empty saloon. There were no other foreigners and only two Chinese men, both in Western suits. They stood up to bow and smile but offered no conversation, and McColl was happy to follow their lead. He took a window seat at the other end of the car and barely had time to place his luggage on the rack before the train slipped into motion.

  If his memory of the local geography was accurate, they would be outside the Tsingtau concession in ten minutes or so and, theoretically at least, beyond German jurisdiction. Of course they owned and ran the railway and probably considered it part of their writ. The local Chinese population might argue the point, but he wouldn’t like to bet on it. There was a British consulate in Tsinan, but also another German concession.
This was much smaller than the one around Tsingtau but would still have some soldiers on hand.

  He wouldn’t feel safe until he was on the train to Pukow and Nanking, which was eleven long hours away.

  The line was still following the shore of the bay, the train advancing at a satisfying pace. It occurred to him that cutting the telegraph wires that ran alongside the tracks would increase his chances by leaps and bounds, but even if granted an opportunity, he lacked the requisite tools.

  And maybe there was no need. The train rattled past the concession’s border post without even stopping, and there were no police or army officers waiting on the platform at Kiautschou, the first town in Chinese territory. It looked like he could relax until they reached Tsinan.

  He got off for a stroll at Kiautschou and took a small clay pot of tea back to his seat. As the train got under way, the conductor sat down beside him with a pot of his own, clearly intent on conversation.

  Over the next twenty minutes, McColl learned a lot about the man and his family. The wife who loved living in Tsingtau, who taught in the school there—the best school in China, according to some. The children liked it, too, though he sometimes thought they were missing much of their German heritage. But they could never have afforded servants in Germany.

  It was clear that he loved his train and the pretty German stations, so out of place against the Chinese backdrop. He told McColl about the line’s short history and how flat it was, with several hundred bridges and not a single tunnel. He pointed out kilns by the side of the line, where bricks had been baked and then broken for ballast, because Shantung province was devoid of suitable stones.

  McColl responded with a wholly fictional life, which he located in Alsace to mask any linguistic mistakes. It was a relief to be speaking openly again, after a fortnight of pretending not to speak German, and he found himself liking the conductor. It was a strange place for a German to end up, but this one seemed at peace with himself and the world.