Rogue Raider (15 page)

Naked, he struggled to his feet, the bed groaning with relief, and headed, panting, for the bathroom. Bare feet padded over damp concrete. Thank God this was the cool, wet season. Thank God he was excused the morning roll call. Lauterbach grasped the great wooden ladle, dipped it in the standing jar of cold water and basted his head with scoop after healing scoop, shaking like a dog. “Oooaarghscheisse!” Then he gave up and just leant forward to plunge his whole face directly in the jar. “Whoarbloobloob.” As he raised his eyes from a swimming world of blur and water, he encountered the trim, prim, disapproving rectangle of Elysium toilet soap. The sight depressed him for some reason. And when he turned round, there stood Taj Mohammed, grinning from ear to ear, holding out his cup of tea and openly ogling the Lauterbach torpedo. Lauterbach growled, seized towel and cup in either hand and slapped him away fiercely.

Taj Mohammed was theoretically the refuse-cart handler of the camp but had determined, for his own unclear reasons, to attach himself to Lauterbach as a sort of freelance helper. His official batman, Private Schmerz, had not taken to this arrangement and now sulked, making only intermittant appearances where he complained with incessant bitterness, like a wronged wife, of his rival. Mohammed was not, Lauterbach suspected, very bright, but he was cheery and willing, unlike joyless and literalist Schmerz, and it pleased him to spin endless fantasies to the boy, rather as he had to Privett and Rose on Diego Garcia. To one who had spent his life in creative mendacity, such flights of fantasy, free as a bird, were liberating. He could shift the pinch and press of reality like gas with a belch. When once he had embarked on such a trail of the imagination, there was no wire, no ditch. He could wander where he would. Anyway, he loved the sound of the boy's Indian-accented English that rumbled and throbbed like a fart in his rainbarrel. Lauterbach had resumed his former extravagant ‘full set' of facial hair but was badly in need of a trim so he slipped on his faded
Troilus
bathrobe, sat on a hard chair and prepared to be soaped and shaved.

“You will know,” Lauterbach assured Mohammed through thick lather, “that all Germans have secretly converted to Islam.”

The boy stopped in mid strop, stared, his jaw dropped. “Is true?”

“Indeed. The latest secret orders have just been delivered from Berlin. You will have heard that Germany has formed an alliance with Muslim Turkey against the British infidels. A holy war has been declared. Even the British papers could not conceal it. I always receive the latest papers since friends send me parcels from the outside. The British foolishly inspect the contents but never think to read the wrapping. The Turks, as you know, are staunch Muslims like the Germans and yourself. You can always tell a good Muslim by his beard.”

The boy broke into a delighted grin and breathed benevolent curry fumes over him.

“Then we go to mosque together. We friend.”

“Ah no” Lauterbach headshaking. “This is a very great secret, Mohammed. If the British knew they would become very angry and do terrible things to all the innocent Muslims under their rule in India. For their sake – for
your
sake – we must say nothing.”

Mohammed executed a firm calligraphic razorstroke the length of Lauterbach's cheek, above the line of his beard. “I no afraid,” he sneered and flicked whiskery foam boldly to the floor in proof of it. “You see. We go mosque together, you me.”

“The mosque? No. We can do better than that. One day we shall go to Mecca, together. We shall go on my ship the
Emden
which the English claim falsely to have sunk. She still sails the Indian Ocean exacting a terrible revenge on their shipping. One day, you will see, she will come to the harbour in Singapore and then we shall go aboard her and sail to Mecca.”

Mohammed clutched the shaving cup to his chest in delight, threw back his head and laughed at the ceiling, scaring the gecko lizards that lived there.

“Mecca!” he cried, slopping ecstatic suds. “We go Mecca together. I become
Haji
Mohammed.”

Lauterbach proffered his other cheek for scraping. “A fine and godly name. His Imperial Majesty, the German Kaiser, too, has already completed his pilgrimage and similarly taken the title of Haji Mohammed Guiliano. The Empress has become Fatima and assumed the veil and my old friend Prince Franz Josef has been formally circumcised with great ceremony and amidst public rejoicing in what was formerly the state opera house in Berlin.”

Mohammed, having begun trimming the broad wings of the moustache, waved the gleaming razor under his nose. “You want circumcise too?”

“Er no. It is not deemed strictly necessary in the case of converts, a certain liberalism in the interpretation of the Koran by the arch-
imam
of Berlin. Moreover, to confuse the enemy, I shall perform my devotions only in the strictest privacy.”

“Is not good to pray the way you do, like a Hindu, in that polluted place.” He gestured towards the bathroom. “Sometimes I hear you praying in there. You saying, ‘Ten, twenty, thirty …'”

Mohammed stepped back to assess the Islamic symmetry of his work and found it good. “You stop drink beer too?” he reproved. “Is bad. Muslim no drink beer.”

“You will be aware from your studies that it is not the act of drinking but the state of drunkenness that is prohibited by the Prophet. Those unaccustomed to beer become easily drunk. I shall therefore continue to maintain my resistance to wicked drunkenness by constant drinking.”

Mohammed shook his head in awe. “You clever man. Very learned, very holy.”

Jemedar Khan shook his head fiercely. “My friend is a clever man.” His voice reached out to the back of the barracks and caught the attention of the few men still lying on their rope beds. “Very learned, very holy. Is he not a postman? Does he not need his great learning for the reading of addresses? Is his position not one of trust where, like us, he wears the uniform of the King Emperor? Yet because he is a Rajput man like ourselves, he is constantly harrassed and persecuted by the other races. Not just the white men of whom nothing better is to be expected but also the Chinese and the Malays who are their servants – yes – and by other Indians like the Pathans, just as we are persecuted by them here in our own regiment.”

He looked round at the circle of eager, nodding turbans. He knew he held them by the beard. “You will not have forgotten the recent vacancy for jemedar that should rightly have gone to Imtiaz Ali, also a clever and learned man, a Rajput man, but was given instead to an ignorant Pathan.” A low growl rose from the men. “Everywhere we are surrounded by a sea of injustice.” The sea hissed in his mouth.

“My friend the postman was thrown recently in jail unjustly for a matter of missing funds. Many people are sending money by the post office, just as you are sending money home to your mothers and wives and sisters. Allah knows it is little enough. Just enough so they do not starve.” He wiped his forehead at the misery of it. “And the people, being ignorant people, cannot sign their names so they just make a mark with their thumbs in ink when they receive that money. It seems that although the receipts are there in the post office with their thumbprints, these people are now saying that they did not have that money. So who took it? And who do they accuse?” Another low growl from the men. “My friend, the Rajput man, always the Rajput man.

So they threw him in jail, a terrible place, and sent a fat white man to take his thumbprints in the jail. ‘This wicked deed,' he said, ‘was not done by a little person. No Malay or Chinese could have made a great thumbprint like this. This is an Indian hand for though a white man has thumbs big enough, no white man could bend low enough to do such a deed. And you are the only Indian postman in this area, so it must be you.' This is what they call cleverness. But when they compared the prints with those on the papers what do you think?” You could hear them holding their breath in the taut silence. “They did not match. Those thumbprints were not my friend's thumbprints.” They exhaled Aah as one. “He is innocent.”

“The fat white man was very stupid. He did not know what to do. He sighed and rolled his eyes and held his many chins.” Jemedar Khan did all three to roars of laughter. “‘It
must
be you,' he kept saying foolishly to my friend. ‘I cannot work out how you did it but it
must
be you.' But my friend is a very clever man like all Rajput men. ‘Call together all the postmen,' he said calmly ‘and I will prove to you who it is.' So they called them all together in one place and the fat white man came and sat down and they brought my friend from the jail. He walked along the line of postmen and looked them, like a man, in the eye and he knew who his enemy was amongst them. It was a very small, very old Chinese.” Jemedar Khan hunched his back and screwed up his face to catcalls from the men.

“‘This,' said my friend, pointing him out, ‘is the villain who has done this terrible thing.' Everyone was amazed. ‘How can this be? You are mad. He is only a tiny man' But my friend bent down and tore off his sandal and there on his big toe was
ink.
'” Cheers, applause.

“So it must always be with injustice. We will not suffer it any longer just as the Rajputs of Singapore will not suffer it any longer. They will rise with us,” he shouted. “Postmen and soldiers shall be as one. Prepare yourselves! Injustice is at an end!”

Mohammed shook his head in awe. “You clever man. Very learned, very holy.”

“Indeed,” Lauterbach assented and stroked his moustache. “That is why I am developing an Islamic garden, a vision of paradise in flowers and shrubs.”

It was almost true. Out there, across from the front door of the bungalow, something blossomed where once had been a mere heap of rubble. It was not Lauterbach himself who did the work of course, especially the troublesome watering, but he directed it from the verandah, lent – as von Muecke would have said – his vision. Various sailors had seeded and trimmed a formal garden, a series of horticultural tattoos really, anchors and knotwork, even an Iron Cross, executed in peonies and box. Experimentation had led to certain subjects being excluded. After a series of unfortunate acned caricatures due to the unpredictable activities of aphids, the face of the Kaiser had been excised. Maps of the fatherland had been vetoed on the grounds that they might give useful geographical information to the enemy and the German flag had only been permitted after some hesitation by the British authorities, though not all parts of it could be made to bloom at the same moment and the black strip was a constant headache for Nature did not favour black plants. At the rear of the bed, a topiary cruiser of the
Emden
class had had her keel laid and a little more rain would grow in the rest of her superstructure. But this constant shifting of images disguised one fact that the British did not notice.- that the mound itself was growing daily larger. It was the dumping ground for dirt from the tunnel. And once the cruiser was complete, her shadow would entirely conceal the tunnel entrance, hidden under a square of turf, from the searchlights that ranged the camp at night.

The tunnel had been a reluctant gesture by Lauterbach towards the grim-jawed
Etappe
members, a bone for them to gnaw on. Just as every nation must have its flag and its army, so, it seemed, every prisoner-of-war camp must have its tunnel. In its way, it had worked excellently, sopped up their excess of patriotic energy and kept them off his back. Moreover, in this separate compound, the only source of wood for shoring up the roof was the empty beer crates, carried in full under the eyes of the guards. Lauterbach was drinking to support his nation, drinking to keep pace with the diggers. There had been a long discussion of possible starting-points and trajectories in which Lauterbach had favoured opening the shaft inside one of the deep latrine pits, since that would certainly slow down the digging – but this had not found favour. And he was far from pleased to have it so close to his own quarters since, if discovered, it would certainly be laid at his door with attendant loss of comforts and privileges. Already, the British had staged a dawn search of his bungalow but, fortunately, his little nest-egg had been well hidden. In the interests of security, he had insisted that no tools be imported but that all works be effected with a spoon and fork filched from the canteen. It would take them another three months at least to make any substantial progress like that and then he would sadly discover either that it was too narrow for him to accompany the escapers or that it must be greatly enlarged, which would put off the evil day still longer. Lauterbach insisted on a patriotic pause in tunnel construction on national holidays and on the birthdays of the German royal family and those of ally Austria and had an uncanny ability to fix those of even the least members of both royal houses. He had bought a little time but not enough. It was clear that once the diggers had free access to the tunnel mouth the rate of progress would be doubled. He sidled across to the garden, bent to sniff appreciatively at a flower and looked furtively around. The guards were leaning out of their watchtower in the other direction. A group of prisoners were staring out through the wire towards the main road and pointing at something. He reached forward to the topiary
Emden
and snapped off what amounted to about fifty feet of glossy, green keel and stuffed it up his tunic. That would hold them for a bit.

The Chinese New Year was a non-digging day. “Too many people about. Too much disruption to the normal timetable,” Lauterbach explained to the confused
Etappe.
Down in Chinatown, crowds were thronging the streets, shopping, getting new year haircuts, eating carp and oranges and dancing dragons in token of good fortune as they watched flames climbing, coughing and farting like old men, up the great strings of firecrackers that hung down from the tenement buildings. In the prisoner-of-war camp, the strutting, shouting Indian troops had been replaced by shy Malays who flitted like pale shadows about the fences. With the departure of his rival, orderly Schmerz had flounced back to his duties, determined to be seen as indispensable. But Lauterbach missed the innocent credulity of Taj Mohammed. It had lent freshness to his world.