by Nigel Barley
In happier days the harbourmaster used to be British, Captain Robertson, a punctilious observer of the old custom of taking a glass with the master of every incoming vessel. It was possible he was still in post and there, suddenly, he was. Lauterbach craned round a corner to see the red boozy face disappear up to the bridge and crept out soft-footed towards the gangway, suitcase under his arm like a tenant doing a moonlight flit.
There, on the mole, in the usual place was a familiar sight, the debauched donkey man, scratching his crotch and waiting, as for many years, for some poor innocent like Pieter Blaamo to blunder into his path. Lauterbach made a great show of hiring two donkeys at absurd prices to transport himself and his luggage to the railway station just as tourists always did. People here were used to comical fat men on tiny donkeys. It was excellent camouflage. Lauterbach would have died first.
Under some odd logic, the Poukow-Nanking line, it seemed, was still operating to a regular schedule and still in German hands. The journey would take three days. But first he made a detour to the harbour postmaster and bought a large envelope. Inside the flap he drew a huge mouth with a finger pressed to it, sealed a soft Chinese banknote inside and wrote “For stokers Gan Poon and Lee Fatt, Otaka Maru.” They could not read or write but would get his message all right. Arrived at the railway station, he bribed his way aboard, pulled down his hat, Etappe-style, and settled down to doze. He was £10,000 pounds, curled up and sleeping like a forgotten deposit account.
Pieter Blaamo perished quite quickly on the Saturday streets of Shanghai. One minute he was walking in spritely fashion down the Bund, convincingly blond, brown eyes hidden behind blue-tinted glasses. The next he was gone, stretched out on the hard paving stones, jauntily hailed to death by an Englishman, walking in the opposite direction.
“Hello Lauterbach. What? You here in Shangers?”
It was Captain Dewar, an old friend from civilian days. Dewar had always been a bit of a dandy, waistcoat with swags of silver chain, boater, spats. He stared at Lauterbach through screwed-in monocle. “There’s something odd about you. Those glasses. You look like an elephant in a pink tutu – different.”
“Not different enough clearly.” There was no point in carrying on this farce any longer. Pieter Blaamo took off the blue lenses and slid them into a pocket. Lauterbach rose again.
Dewar dodged, without thinking, out of the heat into the shade of one of the trees lining the broad avenue and rested his foot easily on a bench. The leaves were beginning to drop and swirled listlessly about them.
“We’ve been hearing a lot about you. What a lot of trouble you’ve caused, Juli-bumm. Who would have thought? I’m surprised to see you walking about, bold as brass, like this. Shanghai may be neutral but you know the Brits run the police and the customs. Being massively corrupt is no impediment to patriotism, old man. They’ve been putting up your picture everywhere and offering a reward. Sooner or later someone’s going to have a crack at claiming it. All they have to do is clonk you on the head one dark night and get you to the British consulate-general then whisk you back to Singapore. There are two British destroyers in the harbour that would be happy to do the job.” He looked out across the river where sampans swarmed around the big ocean-going vessels heading upriver to Soochow Creek. “Look, there’s something else I feel you ought to know. A couple of the chaps whose ships you sent to the bottom are in town and – well – they might bear a grudge too. I’d watch it if I were you. Keep a low profile. God knows, we’ve got more than enough trouble fighting with the Chinese without letting matters get out of hand between ourselves. We’d better not been seen talking together again for my sake. Sorry but there it is. The German navy’s name stinks around here since the sinking of the Lusitania. Best of luck to you.” He tipped his hat and strolled casually off.
The Bund had changed a lot in the past couple of years and Lauterbach, reborn, sauntered along the busy avenue, a sightseeing boulevardier. All the European nations had their concessions in the city after a century of aggression that seemed to have been guided by a sign he had once seen in a Hamburg crockery shop, “China – If you break it, you own it.” The country had, indeed, been smashed and now the business of stripping China of its riches was proceeding at breakneck speed, despite the European war. On the Bund only the pieces of paper to which they were reduced actually moved. and the big European trading houses were still there, hemming in the river, massively pillared and exuding wealthy solidity and were daily being added to. A new heaped-up monstrosity in curlicued Renaissance style called itself the Asiatic Petroleum Building and a couple of doors down was the spanking new Union Assurance of Canton. But the incongruous English Tudor Customs House still stood like a miniature Hampton Court amidst the jostling rickshaws and he paused to set his watch by the clock, known to all as “Big Ching,” as he had so often in the past. Then he clapped on speed and headed for the luxurious Palace Hotel for a lunchtime snifter. But here too was change. A sign tacked to the door regretted that there had been a forest fire in the legendary roof garden and the building was closed for repairs. Robbed of his goal, he dawdled outside and suffered momentary panic on discovering that the German Asiatic Bank, where his money was nested, had disappeared but it seemed it had only moved to new and even more prosperous premises a few doors up. He leant against the wall in relief and fanned himself with his hat and then his eyes lighted on number 3, The Shanghai Club. He was, after all, a member of long standing.
Since he had already been recognised there was no future in hiding any more. His safety would now have to lie in making himself so visible that no one could lay hands on him unobserved. He must be constantly in society. He could head for the Concordia Club at number 22 that catered specifically for Germans but that was too private. He had to make a definitive entrance.
Lauterbach strode confidently up to the marble steps, the uniformed flunky, dressed like an emperor, bowing and flinging wide the door for him, tapped across the patrician tiles, took a deep breath and let his eyes wander the forty-odd feet to the ceiling. It smelled exactly as it always had, of money and power with no hint of the oppression and poverty on which they rested. This was no gentle and companionable club like the sandalwood-scented Harmonie in Batavia. This was all about hierarchy and exclusion and rivalry and Lauterbach might not feel exactly at home here – he was doubly excluded by nationality and lack of wealth – but he knew at least that he had a tolerated right of entry as a member of the officer class, the class that ran things without necessarily owning them.
Gilded lifts ran up the hollow centre of the curving staircase lit by the latest American electrical tungstoliers, all brass and razzmatazz. Up there were cardrooms and ballrooms, dining rooms and the rest of it but Lauterbach knew where he must go. He entered the Long Bar, allegedly the longest bar in the world, aware that every one of its 111 feet had cosmological implications, for it was a picture of Shanghai – and thus the world – in miniature. Men ranged themselves from window to door, as in the English church, according to social rank. The big taipans – of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank and Jardine Matheson – who ran local commerce like warlords, held court arrogantly by the tall windows. The lowest griffins, the clerks and scribes in their crumpled suits, stood by the door, constantly pushed back and forth by their betters. The smoke of a thousand cheroots was whirled away by the fans. Women, animals and natives were not admitted under any circumstances. Non-British were barely suffered. Lauterbach headed through the gale of chortle and gossip for the centre where most drinkers congregated, the middle-class demographic paunch of old Shanghai. He stepped up to the bar and ordered a beer, looking up at the great, glowing, stained glass window made of bottles of many colours, lit from behind.
He was served briskly and without comment and at first no one heeded him. Decently dressed, not a local or afflicted with an obviously contagious and loathsome disease, there was no clear reason to deny him the modest place he had chosen. He signed the chit and it was carried off by a boy to be
spiked. Then he became aware that the French bar steward was peering anxiously on tiptoe at him over the etched glass partition and talking emphatically to the boy. He disappeared to be replaced by a worried, round-faced man in pin-stripes who looked at him too and blanched. Lauterbach was rather enjoying this. The shit was about to hit the ceiling fans and he for once was throwing it. He lit a cheroot and plumed smoke from all boilers.
Pin-stripes appeared silently at his elbow. “Mister Lauterbach?” he whispered in a voice like a hushed fart.
“Captain Julius Lauterbach, actually,” he replied loudly. Instantly silence fell around them. Conversation was sucked into the plush carpet. People turned. Those further off noticed the silence and pivoted round to see what was causing it, those yet further off likewise. In seconds a hush had spread over the entire room, except for an aged military man, rendered stone deaf by the guns, who continued to shout into the void a description of a visit to a new low bar in Blood Alley where the cocktail girls specialised in serving drinks by whacking the glass along the polished bar with their bare breasts. The name Lauterbach slithered hissing through the room.
Pin-stripes was sweating profusely and fingering his tight collar. “Might I have a word in private, sir. There is a slight problem with your membership.”
“A problem?” Lauterbach sipped beer coolly.
“Owing to your long non-attendance at the club, sir, and non-payment of dues we have had to reassign membership. You will understand, sir, that there is alway pressure for new members, especially what with the war and so many British gentlemen …” He stopped, blushed. A sort of collective snarl came from the British taipans by the window and a wordless baying that crystallised slowly into a rugger-club cry of “Out! Out! Out!” A nasty predatory expression was stamped on the beef- and beer-fed faces. There could be roughhousing, debagging, maybe something more unpleasant in the way of judicious violence. Lauterbach drained his drink and turned to look at them, trying hard not to make the glass look like a weapon. He put it down and stubbed out his cheroot with slow deliberation.
“Since, it seems, I am no longer a member of this club,” he said quietly and with a lazy smile, “I shall leave. But I beg you all to remember that you are permitted to invite me back, at any time, as a guest, and I shall not be too proud to accept.”
The baying died slowly as one of the gnarled taipans rose silently, and with arthritic difficulty, to his feet. “The Clan Matheson,” he muttered. “You killed my two beautiful racehorses. I shall never forgive you for that.” He was trembling. There were tears in his eyes. “There is no difference in my book between you and those Hunnish swine who sank the Lusitania with all those innocent souls on board. You spit on everything, smash everything that’s worthwhile. You’ll pay for that, Lauterbach. I’ll see you pay.”
The memory hit Lauterbach like a blow to the solar plexus. “I want you to know,” he said quietly and soberly, “that they did not suffer. They were shot before the ship went down.”
The old man choked and sobbed. His fellows turned away in embarrassment. Such public displays were unmanly. Lauterbach felt an unfulfillable urge to go across and comfort him but there was no way across that carpet and the tears started to his own eyes. He too had briefly loved those horses as something to be set above the reach of war. He turned and walked with dignity towards the door, the young griffins falling back, open-mouthed, to make way for him. He had made his entrance and his point and now everyone knew that Lauterbach was back in town and he stalked through the doors with the steely aplomb of a whaleboned duchess. Over his shoulder, the oblivious military gentleman was still shouting into the silence. “Marvellous stuff. Some of those songsong girls, ya know, could shift a pint of Guinness twenty feet with one twitch of the tit and not spill a drop.”
Lauterbach swaggered out into the crass sunlight of the street, breathing deeply and caught a tram up Nanking Road, climbed off three stops later and made for a small, discreet, modern block of flats, standing back from the road. Swallows were building nests in the guttering, flashing off into the sunshine and returning with beakfuls of grass. From a second-floor window a phonograph brayed out a Chinese song sung by the trilling, nasal, female that was the authentic voice of the East. He stopped and listened then laughed as he recognised it as a Mandarin version of “If I knew you were coming I’d have baked a cake.” He pulled back the grill on the lift and rode to the fifth floor, looked around the landing carefully before coming out and unlocked a blank door with no number, painted in the shade of red that Chinese Feng Shui declares lucky. There were three small rooms and a balcony, furnished simply and sparely, bought from a speculator friend a few years ago, who had convinced him that this was the future. It had every modern convenience, drains, running water, gas lighting and contained nothing of himself, an empty shell he used as a place to dump his kit and hang his hat when in Shanghai.
The curtains were pulled closed and behind them a fly was buzzing resignedly against the glass. The air was hot and heavy with the stale smell of a place shut up too long. In theory, no one had known he was coming and certainly no cake had been baked. Mrs Chin, the widow on the floor above, had agreed to keep an eye on the place, in return, it was understood, for being allowed to snoop in the closets and read Lauterbach’s mail. But now there was no mail and someone else had been here. The drawers on the chipped lacquer commode had been rifled. The bedsheets were tousled as though in some hasty adulterous tryst. The edges of the carpets were flipped back where someone had checked the coins slipped underneath for good luck and marks in the dust showed where ornaments had been recently moved with no time for dust to resettle. Whoever had done it had caused no gratuitous damage but neither had they bothered to conceal their passing.
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 fee
t 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.
