While Waverley was talking to Reece, Randolph was trying to discover what had happened to Michael. He had painfully climbed out of bed and gone down to the library, where he was sitting at his desk in his blue silk bathrobe, telephoning everyone who might have some idea of where Michael had gone, and why.
Dr Ambara’s phone rang and rang and nobody picked it up. The Indonesian office on Madison Street had never heard of anybody called Hunter. ‘We have a Han Tah, sir, if that is of help.’ None of the airlines had received a booking in the name of Michael Hunter, although Sunbelt Airlines was going to fly somebody called Eli Hunter III to Phoenix later that evening. And the desk clerk at Days Inn, where Michael had been staying, had entered his room with a passkey but reported ‘everything normal, sir.
His baggage is still here, so he couldn’t have checked out, and as you know, his accommodation has been paid for a month in advance. Maybe he just took a walk.’
In the end Randolph called Wanda, who had gone back to the office to finish the Petersen contract.
‘Michael’s missing,’ he told her.
‘How could that be? I called him this morning and he was quite happy.’
‘Did he say he was going to go for a walk, anything like that?’
‘He said he was thinking of going for a swim later on. And he promised faithfully that he-was going to call me before he went down to the pool. He was very serious about his security.’
Randolph rubbed his eyes. ‘He couldn’t have been followed, could he?’
‘I don’t think so. We did everything we could to make sure nobody knew where he was.’
‘I’ve been calling Dr Ambara but I can’t raise him. Dr Ambara wouldn’t have told anyone, would he? I mean, he wasn’t strapped for money or anything like that? If Orbus or Waverley had offered him twenty thousand dollars to tell them where Michael was hiding out, you don’t think he would have taken it, do you?’
‘No, sir, I don’t think he would have,’ Wanda replied confidently.
It was then that Randolph’s second phone extension began to blink. ‘Hold on for a moment,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be disloyal to Dr Ambara, but you know, the way this thing seems to be going -‘
He picked up the extension and said, ‘Yes?’
It was Charles. ‘The Days Inn for you, sir. They said that you asked them to call if they had any information about Mr Hunter.’
'Thank you, Charles. Could you put them on?’
It was the same desk clerk to whom Randolph had spoken only twenty minutes earlier. He said flatly, This probably doesn’t signify anything, Mr Clare, but one of my cleaners saw Mr Hunter leave the hotel this afternoon with two men. He kind of noticed the men because they were both dressed in some sort of Army uniform and they both looked - well, I can only quote what my cleaner said, sir - “hard-bitten.”
Please forgive me if they were any friends of yours, sir.’
‘No, thank you, they weren’t, and you did very well to call me.’
Thank you, Mr Clare. We try to help.’
Randolph got back to Wanda. ‘You’re not going to believe this. Reece has got him.
One of the hotel cleaners saw him leaving his room this afternoon with two men in combat jackets.’
‘Oh, my God. Then that means Waverley Graceworthy has him.’
'That’s what it looks like.’
‘But without Michael, you won’t be able to make your case against the Cottonseed Association, will you? If you can’t get into another death trance and if you can’t talk to Marmie …’
Randolph was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘It’s not my case against the Cottonseed Association that matters so much.’
Wanda said sympathetically, ‘I know.’
They both realized, without sharing the thought out loud, that Waverley Graceworthy was quite capable of killing Michael and making sure his body never came to light.
And if Michael were dead, there was no hope of Randolph’s producing any fresh evidence against Waverley, and no hope of his ever seeing Marmie.
Randolph suddenly thought to himself that the prospect of seeing Marmie just one more time was the only inspiration that had kept him going these past two weeks and that even the survival of Clare Cottonseed was nothing beside that one burning hope. He took out his handkerchief, wiped his eyes and shakily transferred the telephone receiver from one hand to the other.
‘What are you going to do?’ Wanda asked.
‘I’m going to call Chief Moyne, for beginners.’
‘Chief Moyne and Waverley Graceworthy are bosom buddies. You told me so yourself.’
‘All the same, there’s been a kidnapping here. That’s a serious offence and Dennis is going to have to take some kind of action. He can’t ignore it.’
‘All right then,’ Wanda agreed. ‘But will you call me back and tell me what he said? I’ll stay at the office until I hear from you.’
‘I’ll get straight back.’
Randolph asked Charles to locate Chief Moyne for him. When he did so within two or three minutes, Chief Moyne sounded agitated and out of sorts. ‘Randy? I’m just about to rush out of the office. We have the fireworks tonight and the Cotton Carnival Ball, and I’m fifteen minutes late already. Charlotte will just about kill me.’
‘Dennis, this is more important than the Cotton Carnival Ball.’
‘Tell that to Charlotte. She’s been dressing up for it for the past two weeks.’
‘Dennis, when I came back from Indonesia last week, I brought a friend with me. A young half-caste, an Indonesian-American. He was staying at Days Inn on Brooks Road. This afternoon when I called him, he was gone.’
There was a long silence. Then Chief Moyne asked with obvious vagueness, ‘What’s that you said? Who? I’m sorry, Randy, I wasn’t really listening there.’
‘Dennis, my friend has been kidnapped. He was last seen by one of the hotel cleaners, who saw him being escorted away from the hotel by two men in combat jackets.’
‘Kidnapped?’ asked Chief Moyne in perplexity.
‘Well, what do you call it when a man is forcibly taken away from his hotel room by two known thugs?’
‘Er, well, this is all pretty woolly,’ Chief Moyne replied. ‘Hey! I guess I shouldn’t be saying “woolly” on the night of the Cotton Carnival Ball, should I? Two men in combat jackets, you say? But was there any clear evidence of forcible abduction?’
‘I told my friend to stay in that hotel room and not to move out of it until I gave him permission.’
‘Oh, yes? And how old was your friend?’
‘I don’t know. Twenty-two, twenty-three.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, Randy, but no matter how strongly you told your friend to stay in that hotel, he was over the age of consent, right? And he could walk out of there anytime he felt like it. I mean, you understand that, don’t you? When a kid gets kidnapped, that’s pretty straightforward, but when an adult goes walking off with two other adults, with no sign of weaponry or physical coercion, well then, that’s different/
‘How did you know there was no sign of weaponry or physical coercion?’ Randolph demanded.
‘Because you never mentioned it, that’s why. And because the very first thing you would have said was, my friend was taken away at gunpoint, or with a rope around his neck, or with his arm twisted behind his back.’
Randolph said, ‘Dennis, you’re not being very helpful. Those two men answered the description of two of Waverley Graceworthy’s hired heavyweights. One of them calls himself Reece, or Ecker. I have every reason to believe that Waverley has kidnapped my friend.’
‘Waverley?’ laughed Chief Moyne. It was difficult for Randolph to tell over the telephone whether the man’s mirth was genuine or synthetic. ‘Now why in the world would Waverley want to kidnap anybody, especially some half-caste guru from Indonesia?’
‘I never said he was a guru.’
‘Aren’t they all gurus? Now listen, Randolph, I really have to run
. Maybe we can talk in the morning.’
‘I never said he was a guru, Dennis. Who told you he was a guru?’
Chief Moyne blustered, ‘You said it yourself. A half-caste guru, that’s what you said.
Now why don’t you come around to see me tomorrow, when we can discuss this rationally?’
‘I can’t come around to see you tomorrow because my friend has been deprived of his liberty tonight, and besides, that Waverley Godalmighty Graceworthy may take it into his head to get rid of him.’
‘What kind of implication is that?’ Chief Moyne wanted to know.
‘It’s probably slanderous,’ Randolph retorted. ‘But I can prove it, and if you ask me, so can you. Waverley Graceworthy has been pulling your strings too damned long, Dennis, and it’s time you stopped dancing.’
Chief Moyne said quietly, ‘I choose to forget that remark, Randy. I can understand that you made it in the heat of the moment.’
‘I don’t want you to forget it, Dennis. I want it to burn in your brain like a branding iron.’
‘Listen, Randy,’ Chief Moyne said, uncomfortable now, ‘let me send you one of my senior officers. Maybe you can talk it out with him.’
‘I don’t need to talk about it, Dennis. I know what’s going on; I wasn’t born yesterday, and I’m not about to die tomorrow. I want you to send a team out right now, and I want you to surround Waverley Graceworthy’s home, and I want my friend brought out of there alive.’
Chief Moyne blew a long, slow breath. ‘Well, I’m sorry, Randy. I can understand your ire, but I couldn’t do anything like that, not without a properly sworn warrant, and even then, I’d be risking my job.’
‘Believe me, Dennis, I’ll break you for this if it’s the last thing I do,’ Randolph warned him. ‘We were supposed to be friends, you and I. We’ve had dinner together, gone fishing together, watched ball games together. I respect you - or at least I used to respect you - because you were always independent and you always upheld the law, no matter what. No matter what, Dennis, you always did! And now listen to you. My friend has been kidnapped and you know as well as I do who’s responsible. And yet you won’t move. You’re frozen. Because, Jesus, Dennis, you don’t move one inch these days unless Waverley Grace-worthy gives you the nod.’
Chief Moyne said in a voice scarcely his own, ‘My daughter had cancer, Randy. You know that. She was three years at Baptist Memorial before she died. So, you know, don’t talk to me about respect.’
‘You won’t do it, then? You won’t go out to Waverley’s house and get my friend?’
‘No, sir.’
Randolph licked his lips and found they were dry. He was beginning to feel that he was standing on an island that was gradually being cut away underneath his feet.
Inch by inch, turf by turf, until there was nothing left but the black and threatening sea.
He said gently, ‘You go off to your ball, Dennis,’ and then he put down the phone.
He sat at his desk for a minute or two before picking up the phone again and calling Wanda. ‘You were right about Chief Moyne. He won’t respond. Waverley paid his daughter’s hospital expenses.’
Wanda said, ‘I didn’t know that. What happened to his daughter?’
‘She died,’ Randolph said bitterly.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Michael woke up and it was dark. He groped around until he found a bedside table and then a lamp. He switched on the light, sat up and looked around. He had been dreaming that he was in Bali, in the room he used to live in with his mother after his father had burned himself to death. The roof had been constructed of corrugated iron, and every morning the roosters had walked across it with a scratching, metallic sound that had frightened him.
But he was not in Bali. He was lying on a single bed in a small room at the far end of the upstairs corridor in Waverley Graceworthy’s mansion. He touched the walls and wondered if the room had ever been used to imprison anybody else because there was no wallpaper, just bare brown plastering, and someone had scratched a long row of marks into it as if marking off the days. Or even the weeks?
There was a basin with a faucet that constantly dripped, a small window covered by slatted plastic blinds, a table with a battered top and a chair with a broken back.
Michael climbed off the bed and went across to the window, where he parted the blinds and peered out, but there was little to see. A large triangular section of tiled roof, the side of a dormer window and the glow of one of the carriage lamps that illuminated Waverley Graceworthy’s driveway. The silhouetted top of a large cotton wood tree. The reflected red gleam on a window of an automobile’s tail-light.
Michael tried to open the window but the sash had been screwed into the frame. He stared out for a while longer, then let the blind snap back and went to sit on the edge of the bed. He said a prayer to Sanghyang Widi, and to Yama, and he wished he had learned the sacred art of making himself invisible, which his oldpedanda had always claimed that he himself was unable to do. Total sublimation of the self, total denial of the ego, total humility both physical and spiritual, that was the secret. Then the body would simply vanish.
He had smoked the last of his cigarettes. Well, he had wanted to give them up anyway. He had started smoking after his first serious accident with leyaks. His pedanda would have frowned on him for smoking, but by then he had lost his aspirations to be a priest. He had lived only for the sake of living, for finding out what he was supposed to be doing in this worid, a half-caste Balinese-American living in Denpasar with no money, very little skill and a natural ability to talk to the dead. It was not the sort of curriculum vitae that guaranteed success in any walk of life. ‘Oh, yes, and what did your father do?’ ‘He set fire to himself because he couldn’t understand why he shouldn’t.’
There was no mirror in the room and Michael began to wonder what he looked like.
Pale probably, with tousled hair and a fifteen hours’ growth of beard. He knew he was sweaty. The room was insufferably close and he began to imagine that he could not breathe. He took shallow, panting breaths, hoping they might help him eke out the oxygen longer. He wondered what it had been like for those Indonesian women who had been bricked up inside their husbands’ shrines. He had seen death from both sides of the grave and he still found it frightening and difficult to understand, an extraordinary transition from flesh to spirit, a dismemberment of body and soul, always tragic and always perplexing. Perhaps the’ most tragic and perplexing part about it was that the dead were not safe even when they were dead. The world of the living and the world of the dead were equally crowded with princes and predators. Death, like life, was a swarming hierarchical pyramid of privilege and pain, of attainment and punishment, of agony and rishes, at the top of which the gilded gods resided with their serene and idiotic smiles.
It was the gradual erosion of his faith in the gods that had made death trances more dangerous for Michael. He knew that Reece and his men had not been entirely to blame for what had happened at the Dutch Reform Cemetery in Denpasar. His own lack of celestial purity had alerted the leyaks too, and that was the reason they had not only been swarming close by, but lying in wait for him at the very place he intended to go.
He went to the washbasin after a while and splashed his face with cold water. He drank a little of it out of his cupped hands. He was just drying his face on the shoulder of his T-shirt when the door was noisily unlocked and opened and Waverley Graceworthy came in, closely followed by Reece.
‘Well, well,’ smiled Waverley. ‘I hope you’ve been comfortable.’
Michael said, ‘I could use a cigarette.’
Waverley gave Reece a backhanded beckon and Reece tossed Michael a fresh pack of True with a mocking smile that seemed to mean, ‘Sorry they’re not your regular dog-shit brand.’ Waverley watched Michael patiently as he tore open the pack, tapped out a cigarette and lit it.
‘I came to ask you if you might have changed your mind,’ Waverley said. ‘It does seem rather foolish
, doesn’t it, for you to spend day after day incarcerated here when a simple favour would not only make you wealthy, but ensure your release?’
‘Do you honestly think I trust you to let me go?’ Michael asked.
‘My dear friend, you have my word on it.’
Michael shook his head. ‘The answer is still no. All you’re offering me is a choice of ways to die. At least if I suffocate to death in this room, or if you decide you’ve had enough of me and shoot me, my soul will go to heaven and the chances of my being devoured by the Goddess Rangda will be slight rather than certain.’
Waverley sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘I do find it amazing that you actually believe in these things. The Goddess Rangda! Now she sounds fearful!’
'Take it from me, she is fearful.’
Waverley traced a pattern on the floor with the tip of his cane. ‘And the answer is still definitely no?’
The answer is still definitely and positively no.’
‘Well, you know, that gives me some difficulty,’ Waverley said. ‘And the difficulty is that your patron, Randolph Clare, has been making inquiries about you and insisting that the police department search my premises in the rather optimistic belief that they might find you here.’
‘What’s optimistic about that?’ Michael asked. ‘I am here, aren’t I?’
‘You are at the moment, dear boy. But whether you will still be here when the police make their search tomorrow depends entirely on you.’
Waverley paused for a moment and then added, The chief of police is an excellent chum of mine, you see, and he believes that he has been able to stall Mr Clare for tonight. But Mr Clare, for all of his trespasses, still has money and influence, and if he demands that a search be made … well, the chief will have to do it, and I will have to accede to it.’
Michael said, ‘Put that into plain English.’
‘It’s very simple. If you don’t agree to take me into a death trance by seven o’clock tomorrow morning, you and Reece will be taking a scenic drive together and only Reece will be coming back.’
Death Trance Page 37