Authors: David Downing
That evening he had an English edition of William Le Queux’s
Invasion of 1910
under his arm.
“What do you think of it?” McColl asked him once the waiter had taken the German’s order.
“Well, several things. It’s so badly written, for one. The plot’s ridiculous, and the tone is hysterical.”
“But otherwise you like it?”
Von Schön smiled. “It is strangely entertaining. And the fact that so many English people bought it makes it fascinating to a German. And a little scary, I have to say.”
“Don’t you have any ranters in Germany?”
Von Schön leaned slightly forward, a mischievous expression on his face. “With the Kaiser at the helm, we don’t need them.”
McColl laughed. “So what have you been doing today?”
“Finishing up, actually. I’ll be leaving in a couple of days.”
“Homeward bound?”
“Eventually. I have work in Tokyo first. But after that …”
“Well, if I don’t see you before you go, have a safe journey.”
“You, too.” Von Schön drained the last of his schnapps and got to his feet. “And now I have someone I need to see.”
Once the German was gone, McColl consulted his watch. It was time he visited the Blue Dragon, before the evening rush began. He left a generous tip, recovered his winter coat from the downstairs cloakroom, and walked out to the waiting line of rickshaws. The temperature had already dropped appreciably, and he was hugging himself as the coolie turned left onto the well-lit Friedrichstrasse and started up the hill. The shops were closed by this time, the restaurants readying themselves for their evening trade. The architecture, the faces, the cooking smells, all were European—apart from his coolie, the only Chinese person in sight was a man collecting horse dung.
It was quiet, too—so quiet that the sudden blast of a locomotive whistle from the nearby railway station made him jump.
The coolie reached the brow of the low hill and started down the opposite slope into Taipautau. The township was almost as neat and widely spaced as the German districts, and in the cold air even the smells seemed more muted than they had in Shanghai. They were halfway down Shantung Strasse before McColl could hear the beginnings of evening revelry in the sailors’ bars at the bottom.
The Blue Dragon was open for business but not yet really awake. The usual old man sat beneath the candlelit lanterns on the rickety veranda, beside the screened-off entrance. He grinned when he recognized McColl and cheerfully spat on the floor to his right, adding one more glistening glob to an impressive mosaic.
McColl was barely through the doorway when an old woman hurried down the hall toward him. “This way, please!” she insisted in pidgin German. “All type girls!”
“I’m here to see Hsu Ch’ing-lan,” he told her in Mandarin, but she just looked blank. “Hsu Ch’ing-lan,” he repeated.
The name seemed to percolate. She gestured for him to follow and led him through to the reception area, where “all type girls” were waiting in an assortment of tawdry traditional costumes on long red-velvet sofas. Some were barely out of puberty, others close to menopause. One seemed amazingly large for a Chinese woman, causing McColl to wonder whether she’d been fattened up to satisfy some particular Prussian yearning.
The old woman led him down the corridor beyond, put her head around the final door, and told Madame that a
laowai
wanted to see her. Assent forthcoming, she ushered McColl inside.
Hsu Ch’ing-lan was sitting at her desk, apparently doing her accounts. Some kind of incense was burning in a large dragon holder beyond, sending up coils of smoke.
“Herr McColl,” she said with an ironic smile. “Please. Take a seat.”
She was wearing the usual dress, blue silk embroidered in silver and gold, ankle-length but slit to the hip. Her hair was piled up in curls, secured by what looked like an ornamental chopstick. She was in her thirties, he guessed, and much more desirable than any of the girls in reception. When they’d first met, she’d told him that she was a retired prostitute, as if that were a major achievement. It probably was.
He had chosen this brothel for two reasons. It offered a two-tier service—those girls in reception who catered to ordinary sailors and the occasional NCO, and another, more exclusive, group who did house calls at officers’ clubs and businessmen’s hotels. The latter were no younger, no more beautiful, and no more sexually inventive than the former, but as Jane Austen might have put it, they offered more in the way of accomplishments. They sang, they danced, they made a ritual out of making tea. They provided, in Ch’ing-lan’s vivid phrase, “local-color fuck.”
She was his second reason for choosing the place. She came
from Shanghai and, unlike any other madam in Tsingtau, spoke the Chinese dialect that McColl knew best.
She pulled a bell cord, ordered tea from the small girl who came running, and asked him, rather surprisingly, what he knew of the latest political developments.
“In China?” he asked.
She looked at him as if he were mad. “What could matter here?” she asked.
“Sun Yat-sen could win and start modernizing the country,” he suggested. “Or Yuan Shih-kai could become the new emperor and keep the country locked in the past.”
“Pah. You foreign devils have decided we must modernize, so Yuan cannot win. And you control our trade, so Sun could win only as your puppet.”
“Yuan bought one of my cars.”
“He thinks it will make him look modern, but it won’t. It doesn’t matter what he or Sun does. In today’s China everything depends on what the foreign devils do. Is there going to be a war between you? And if there is, what will happen here in Tsingtau?”
“If there’s a war, the Japanese will take over. The Germans might dig themselves in—who knows? If they do, the town will be shelled. If I were you, I’d take the boat back home to Shanghai before the fighting starts.”
“Mmm.” Her eyes wandered around the room, as if she were deciding what to take with her.
The tea arrived and was poured.
“So what do you have for me?” McColl asked.
“Not very much, I’m afraid.” The East Asia Squadron was going to sea at the end of February, for a six-week cruise. The
Scharnhorst
had a new vice captain, and there’d been a serious accident on the
Emden
—several sailors had been killed in an explosion. The recent gunnery trials had been won by the
Gneisenau
, but all five ships had shown a marked improvement, and the Kaiser had sent a congratulatory telegram to Vice Admiral von Spee. And a
new officer had arrived from Germany to set up a unit of flying machines.
“I know about him,” McColl said.
“He likes to be spanked,” Ch’ing-lan revealed.
McColl wondered out loud whether verbal abuse might sting the Germans into indiscretions. Maybe the girls could deride their German clients, make fun of their puny fleet. What hope did they have against the mighty Royal Navy?
As she noted this down, a swelling sequence of ecstatic moans resounded through the building. Ch’ing-lan shook her head. “I’ll have to talk to her,” she said. “The others do the same because they think their tips will be smaller if they don’t, and after a while none of us can hear ourselves think. It’s ridiculous.”
McColl laughed.
“But I do have some good news for you. I have a new girl, a cousin from Shanghai. She speaks a little English, and now she’s learning a little German—she knows that a lot of the men like someone they can talk to.”
“That sounds promising.”
“And more expensive.”
“Of course—I have no problem paying good money for good information.” He thought for a moment. “She could be worried that her officer might be killed in a war. The British are so much more powerful, yes? She could ask for reassurance, ask him how he thinks his fleet can win.”
She nodded.
“And the flying-machine man. I’d like to know how many machines, what type, and how he intends to use them. Between spanks, of course.”
She nodded again. “Is that all?”
“I think so. I’ll come back on Friday, yes?”
“Okay. You want girl tonight? Half price?”
He hesitated and saw Caitlin Hanley’s face in his mind’s eye. “No, not tonight.” He smiled at her. “You’re still retired, right?”
“You couldn’t afford me.”
“Probably not.” He gave her a bow, shut the door after him, and walked back down the corridor. Bedsprings were squeaking behind several curtained doorways, and several girls seemed intent on winning the prize for most voluble pleasure. Out on the veranda, the old man gave him a leer and added another splash of phlegm to his iridescent patchwork.
It was enough to put a man off his dinner.
The following day was as clear and cold as its predecessor. McColl rose early and took breakfast in the almost empty hotel restaurant, conscious that half a dozen Chinese waiters were hovering at his beck and call. Once outside, he made straight for the beach. A westerly wind was picking up, and he could smell the brewery the Germans had built beyond the town. The ocean was studded with whitecaps.
As he’d calculated, the tide was out, and he walked briskly along the hard sand toward the promontory guarding the entrance to the bay. The field-artillery barracks he’d noticed on the map were set quite a distance back from the shore and, as he had hoped, only the roofs and tower were visible from the beach. He was soon beyond them, threading his way down a narrowing beach between headland and ocean.
Another half a mile and he found his path barred by a barbed-wire fence. It ran down slope and beach and some twenty yards out into the water, to what was probably the low-tide mark. He had first seen barbed wire corralling Boer women and children in South Africa, and finding it stretched across a Chinese beach was somewhat depressing, if rather predictable. There was no
EINTRITT VERBOTEN
sign, but there didn’t really need to be. Only an idiot would think the fence was there to pen sheep.
McColl decided to be one. A quick look about him failed to detect any possible witnesses, so he took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his trousers, and waded out and around the end of the
fence. The water was deeper and colder than he had expected. After drying his feet as best he could with a handkerchief, he wrung out his trouser bottoms, inserted his sand-encrusted feet into the dry footwear, and ventured on down the forbidden beach. I went paddling in the Yellow Sea, he thought. Something to tell his grandchildren, should he ever have any.
As he approached the end of the headland, the stern of a passenger ship loomed into view. It had obviously just left the harbor and was already turning southward, probably bound for Shanghai. McColl found himself wishing he were on it, rather than seeking out German guns with a pair of cold, wet trousers clinging to his thighs. He’d already earned the pittance that Cumming was paying him. What did the man expect from a brief visit like this one? A serious spying mission to Tsingtau would need a lot more time—and a lot better cover—than McColl had at his disposal. Cumming’s favorite agent, Sidney Reilly, had lived in Port Arthur for several months before he succeeded in stealing the Russian harbor-defense plans.
McColl stopped and scrutinized the view to his right. The guns were up there somewhere, and this looked as good a spot as any to clamber up the slope. If he ran into officialdom, he would play the lost tourist, afraid of being cut off by the incoming tide.
Five minutes later he reached the crest and got a shock. The gun emplacements were up there all right, just as the Admiralty had thought they would be, but so were watching eyes. McColl was still scrambling up onto the plateau when the first shout sounded, and it didn’t take him long to work out that dropping back out of sight was unlikely to win him anything more than a bullet in the spine. They’d seen him, and that was that.
Two soldiers in pickelhaube helmets were running across the grass. He walked toward them, mind working furiously. The lost-tourist act already seemed redundant—an Englishman this close to German guns was surely too much of a coincidence. But what was the alternative?
One of their guns went off, and for a single dreadful moment he thought they were shooting at him. But it quickly became obvious that one of them had pulled his trigger by accident. Seizing what seemed like an opportunity, McColl lengthened his stride, shook his fist, and angrily asked in German what the hell they thought they were doing.
“No civilians are allowed up here,” the older of the soldiers insisted. He looked a little shamefaced but had not lowered his rifle. “Who are you? Where have you come from?”
“My name is Pluschow,” McColl told him impulsively. There were two thousand soldiers in the garrison, and it seemed unlikely that these two would have run into the aviation enthusiast. “Lieutenant Pluschow,” he added, taking a guess at the man’s rank. “I am sorry—I did not realize I had strayed onto army territory. But I can’t believe your orders are to shoot first and ask questions later.”
“That was an accident,” the younger man blurted out. He couldn’t have been much more than eighteen.
“And no harm done,” his partner insisted. “But you still haven’t explained what you’re doing here.”
“I’m surveying the area. Tsingtau needs an aerodrome, and I’m getting a feeling for the local air currents.” He reached for his packet of cigarettes and held it out to the soldiers.
There was a moment of hesitation before the older one extended a hand and took one. His partner happily followed his lead.
“If I need to come up here again, I will get permission from army command,” McColl promised. “Now, is there a supply road back to town?”
There was, and they were happy to show him where it started, on the other side of the emplacements. Walking past the latter, he took in the ferroconcrete installations, heavy steel cupolas, and lift-mounted searchlights. And the guns were new-looking 28-centimeter pieces, not the old 15-centimeter cannons on the
Admiralty list. “Our base seems well protected,” he said appreciatively.
He thanked the soldiers, promised he wouldn’t mention the accidental discharge, and left them happily puffing on his cigarettes. He managed to cover a hundred yards or so before the urge to burst out laughing overcame him. Moments like that made life worth living.