by Garry Disher
Auhl reached the road leading to Fanning’s villa. More small houses, a school—and a small mosque. Not many of these in Bali, Auhl thought. It was a modest building, white, with a tiled roof, two green domes and ornate mosaic work around doors and windows.
But mostly Auhl was interested in the villa. It overlooked the mosque from halfway up a slope. To reach it Auhl ran, doubled over, across the road to the surrounding wall. Concealed now, he skirted the building, making his way to the paddy system above. Finding a grove of trees on a bank, he sat where he couldn’t be seen. Families were stirring in a couple of nearby houses, and from his vantage point Auhl saw hens pecking about, a goat straining its leash, TV sets flickering. Palm fronds whispered and chattered, far-off motorcycles stuttered, a coconut fell onto a roof.
AUHL WAITED THROUGH the morning as massive cloudbanks adorned with strange horizontal rainbow bands gathered in the west. There were no signs of life in Fanning’s villa until mid-morning, when a woman arrived accompanied by a small child. She let herself in. Emerged later to shake out a broom. Later again to toss soapy water onto the garden. Lloyd Fanning finally appeared late morning sporting a bad case of bed hair, bum-crack pyjama pants and a vast white belly. He glared at the view, went inside and re-emerged later with damp hair, combed, and wearing shorts and a T-shirt. He sat at his veranda table with a laptop. When the woman brought him a tray of food he ignored her.
The hours passed. Mid-afternoon a man arrived with a machete, hacked at some dead palm fronds. Left again. The woman departed with her child. Auhl stirred to move but a taxi appeared in the street below, turning up Fanning’s driveway. Fanning stepped out of the house wearing trousers and a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt. As if the driver were deaf he shouted, ‘You take me Apache Underground? Kuta?’
WHEN THEY WERE GONE Auhl hurried down to the main road and hailed a taxi to his hotel, where he showered and changed.
Early evening now, he took another taxi, this time to Kuta Beach.
It was a place of young Balinese men lounging—in doorways, on little Hondas—and Western families strolling, their daughters scuffing along in scraps of flimsy cotton; cars and mopeds crawling and tooting. Auhl found Apache Underground opposite the Discovery shopping mall and saw Fanning at a table with three other men; they were just leaving.
He went back outside and waited. Followed Fanning and his companions when they emerged, noting the way they crowded the footpath, peering drunkenly at restaurant menu boards. He drew nearer, unrecognised in a floppy hat, sunglasses and his new beard, as the men came to a decision. Heard one man say, ‘This place suit you guys?’ and another say, ‘Good as any.’
THE SAMBAL BEACH Club restaurant was above a shop selling bootleg DVDs. Auhl waited for fifteen minutes, occasionally glancing up. Dim lights, discordant music, silhouetted people. He checked the time, seven-forty-five, and climbed the steps. Found himself in a large space overlooking the beach, with a scattering of dining tables, the bar a U-shaped island in the centre. Fanning and his friends were at a table on the other side of the bar.
Auhl hesitated. On his side of the bar there were tourists on stools; a single empty stool next to a woman wearing a thin cotton dress. That seat would give him a clear line of sight to Fanning. He found himself saying, ‘May I?’
She flashed him a tired smile; he settled beside her and ordered a beer.
Cast the occasional glance Fanning’s way.
Silhouetted against an extravagant sunset, the four men were tucking into nasi goreng and Tiger beer. Nothing distinctive about them. None of them young, all wearing the middle-aged holiday uniform of loose shirts and cargo pants. Auhl guessed they had known each other for a while: Fanning had been coming to Bali for years. Maybe the others had, too. Maybe they lived here.
He felt uneasy suddenly. What if other bar patrons were interested in Fanning and his fellow diners—Australian Federal Police, for example? He ran his gaze over the room. A handful of tourists, muted lighting, murmured voices. Too early for the dance music, or the wasted twenty-somethings from Melbourne, Auckland, Berlin, Los Angeles…Just then Fanning raised his head as if feeling the force of Auhl’s scrutiny and Auhl immediately turned towards the woman beside him.
‘Can I buy you a drink?’
She had been fiddling with her iPhone. Fiddling and muttering. ‘You can tell me why my phone’s frozen, that’s what you can do.’
Australian. Slightly unfocused, not looking especially happy. Strong, bony hands and tanned arms, shoulders and thighs in a sleeveless dress. She leaned towards Auhl and peered at him. She was pretty, slightly sloshed, more friendly than wary. And, he thought, perfect cover. Fanning, glimpsed from the corner of Auhl’s eye, had returned to his meal.
‘Reboot it,’ Auhl said.
‘Pardon?’
‘Switch it off and on again.’
‘Huh.’
He watched as she did that, his shoulder touching hers now, and finally she was saying, ‘Well, what do you know.’
She looked at him. ‘I should be buying you a drink.’
‘Sure.’
HER NAME WAS LOUISE. She was thirty-five and a little maudlin, but her mood lifted as they talked. In a land of holidaying nurses, schoolteachers and hairdressers, she was an anthropology postgrad taking a break from field work. Now she was coming to the end of her week at a Nusa Dua resort and was starved for company. ‘You know who stays at those places? Teenage drunks too stupid to live and married couples who want to be waited on by native people while their kids go crazy.’
So she’d taken a taxi to Kuta Beach. More young drunks and middle-aged couples, thought Auhl. And me. Her knees bumped against his under the table. Once or twice their hands touched. It was nice.
THEN THEY WERE DINING at a table a few metres away from Fanning’s. The day had been hot and humid; the evening was mild and humid, punctuated by a quick, fierce tropical downpour that drew a curtain over the sunset and freshened the air briefly, before the odours of cooked spices, garbage and piss drifted in on the tails of it. They talked and dined and Auhl, occasionally scratching the new beard, watched Fanning.
‘It’s not like I’m huge or anything,’ Louise said at one point, ‘but when I’m with them I feel huge, you know?’
Auhl nodded.
‘Self-conscious,’ she said. ‘On account of Indonesian people are so…so…petite.’
‘I understand.’ He understood that she was lonely. So was he. He understood that she needed to vent a little. Well, so did he; that’s why he was here.
‘Like if I go out on one of the boats or help with the fish processing or just sit and have a meal with them—and they’re always offering me food, I’m getting so fat—I feel like some great, lumbering water buffalo.’
‘Take it from me,’ Auhl said, ‘you’re not.’
Tall, yes, with those capable hands and broad feet. Hair bleached and flesh dusky from months of studying Sumatran fisher-folk on land and sea. But certainly no water buffalo. More slender than solid.
Then she was eyeing him, shrewd despite the wine she’d drunk. ‘Alan, you’re not going to start talking about your wife and kids, are you?’
He could talk at length about them but rarely felt the need. He smiled, shook his head. ‘When do you return to the village?’
He wondered if the question was a misstep. It raised unspoken questions.
Louise gazed at him levelly and said, ‘Tomorrow afternoon.’
He looked away. He’d not checked on Fanning for a while. Fanning was still there.
Returning to Louise, he said, ‘Are you examining relationships, structures, men’s work, women’s work…?’
She winced, and it came out haltingly, how she’d come to Indonesia intending to study the fisher boys in the Straits of Malacca. Virtual slave labourers working far from shore on the rickety, unlicensed fishing platforms known as jermals. She’d had it all mapped out: a year and a half of field work and archival research, two or three years of writing, result
ing in a stunning PhD and a powerful book…until she was chased off by fisheries inspectors and navy officials in the pay of jermal owners. But by then she was ready to quit anyway.
‘Boys as young as twelve, working up to twenty-three hours a day,’ she told Auhl. ‘For months at a time. Paid a pittance if they’re paid at all, crap food, back-breaking work. No toilets, no beds, no first aid, regular beatings, fierce storms. Some of them drown, no one cares. Broke my heart.’
The acts of talking, unburdening, had loosened some of her tightness. She grew rueful and comic, grinned at him, watched her fingers on his forearm. Auhl risked a glance. Fanning was still there.
Then Louise was resting her chin in her palms and eyeing Auhl. ‘Enough about me. Tell me about you.’
Not quite so tipsy now. Warm, but he could see her thinking: solitary, middle-aged Australian male on holiday in Bali. Sleazebag? She would gather her things in a moment and call it a night. Auhl didn’t want that. She was cover. And he liked her.
Putting on a non-sleazy face he said, ‘I work for the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre,’ and gestured at the air—clear this evening but who knew what tomorrow would bring? The ash cloud from Mount Raung, on East Java, could close the airport at any time.
Louise relaxed. ‘Working holiday.’
‘Something like that.’
‘I wish you could wave a magic wand. When I’m not sitting around the village feeling fat I’m coughing my lungs up.’
‘You get the ash down there?’
She shook her head. ‘Smoke from the jungle fires. Then I come to Bali and strike ash clouds.’
‘Tell me about it,’ said Auhl, wondering if his flight out would get cancelled. He couldn’t afford to be stuck here.
He looked over the balcony railing at the darkening sand and sea of Kuta Bay, the eastern tip of Java a distant, smeary silhouette through the ash-filtered sunset. A Balinese family walked by but mostly the beach strollers were Westerners. An obese man lay flat on a low table on the sand, enduring the last massage of the evening: now and then one leg spasmed in protest. The odours of the day intensified: perfumed tropical plants, wok oil, beer, deodorant, cigarettes. Auhl felt Louise’s warm hands around his.
‘What does the job entail?’
Christ if Auhl knew. ‘Monitoring.’ That probably covered it.
Their meals arrived, a green curry for Auhl, salad for Louise. She picked at it and eyed Auhl’s dish. ‘Have some,’ he urged.
She was torn. ‘I have to be careful.’
‘Can I say something?’
‘Uh-oh. What?’
‘I think you look lovely. I’d never get tired of looking at you.’
She blinked and took her hand away. ‘Objectification is a key theme in my line of work. Whose gaze? Can we be neutral? Can we know the other? Can we, should we, avoid objectifying and representing the other in our own terms? Et cetera.’ But then she grinned, as if she wouldn’t dream of objectifying him as an old sleazebag. ‘But thank you.’
Then she gave him a look. ‘Crunch time. Tomorrow I have to return to the village and you have to go watch clouds, so can we pretend we’re lovers on holiday?’
Auhl touched her taut forearm. ‘Sure.’
But he needed to know Fanning’s movements. His tension showed in his face.
Louise looked away. ‘I mean, if you don’t want to…’
Auhl was saved by Fanning himself saying to his friends, ‘Sorry, guys, no clubbing, I need a sleep-in.’
‘As they say in the classics’—Auhl’s hand encircled Louise’s wrist lightly—‘your place or mine?’
SHE TOOK HIM TO the Sanur Paradise Lagoon, a resort east of Kuta. ‘Certainly a step up from my crappy hotel,’ Auhl said.
A collection of small villas set among swimming pools and coconut and bamboo groves, with further pools and restaurants overlooking the beach and out to Lembongan and Penida islands. Expensive, but Louise had been determined to treat herself, and Auhl found himself led in soft moonlight along a path and up steps and through a door to a vast suite: bedroom, sitting room, bathroom, a balcony brushed by palm tree fronds and overlooking yet another pool, glowing blue.
‘I see what you mean by treating yourself.’
‘It’s an ongoing process,’ Louise said, beginning with his top shirt button.
Then the shirt was off and she trailed her fingers over his chest, shoulders and back. ‘What’s this scar from?’
A nasty slash from the bottom of his rib cage to his navel. ‘I was walking along, minding my own business, and came across this street gang robbing an old woman. After I’d saved her, they turned on me.’
‘What happened?’
‘They killed me, damn it.’
‘What, and now you’ve been reincarnated as an environment protection bureaucrat?’
She looked up at him trustingly, still stroking his skin. Auhl wondered if he’d see her again. Unlikely. If he did, sooner or later he’d have to say he was a cop. He’d have to be truthful and tell her he’d been stabbed by a kid high on meth a few days after graduating from the academy. Or maybe she’d learn about him sooner than that. Maybe Indonesian or Australian Federal Police officers would track her down and grill her about the bearded man she’d spent a night with.
He said, ‘It happened when I was a kid. I got cut by a nail when I was climbing a fence.’
She kissed it better.
‘IF I’D KNOWN I’D BE performing cunnilingus,’ he said later, not feeling entirely original, ‘I’d have shaved more closely.’
But some things proved to be universal. Louise cuffed his ginger head and told him to get on with it.
He got on with it and woke at 5.00 a.m. to find a smooth thigh pressed against him. He stared at the ceiling and experienced a liberating sense of thankfulness. He hadn’t felt wanted or attractive to someone for a long time. Finally, he stirred. Showered, dressed, scribbled his Melbourne landline number on a sheet of resort notepaper, along with a row of kisses, and let himself out.
In no particular hurry, he strolled along the beach, the air hazy, warm, the sand almost unpeopled in the last hour of moonlight, only ranks of empty deckchairs aimed at the sea. Yard servants were sweeping leaves, picking up palm fronds and tourist litter, clearing entrances. A decorative culture, he thought, passing a villa set back behind a low stone wall, amid palm trees and stone columns, vases, urns and figures from Hindu mythology. The stonework wore a patina of damp green moss, and a moist, oily heat was already seeping into the day.
He took a laneway that led away from the beach, passing small houses behind walls. At the end, he came to streetlights, a strip of motorcycle repairers and stone-carving businesses. Vehicles and noise now: cars, a truck, a family of four rolling by, balanced on the spine of a tiny sputtering Honda. A man on the other side of the road pissed against a wall, his back to Auhl, and then a taxi appeared.
Auhl gave the name of the yoga retreat in Fanning’s village.
A REPEAT OF YESTERDAY, except that he was earlier.
But just as he was ducking into the cover of the villa wall, the air was torn open with sound and he jumped in fright. The mosque, broadcasting the call to prayer from four loudspeakers on a high pole in the front yard. Auhl had barely subsided back into the shade when Fanning emerged from the villa. An obese, determined figure in boxer shorts, carrying an axe. Certain he’d been spotted, Auhl ran back to the far corner of the wall and down into a ditch, his heart hammering.
Time went by. He risked a glance. Fanning was intent on the mosque. Auhl watched him enter the grounds and make straight for the loudspeaker pole. With a waggle of his large buttocks, Fanning swung the axe head high above his head, seemed to expand mightily, then brought down the blade in a savage, cleaving stroke.
Sudden silence. Satisfied, Fanning strode back across the lane, through his gate and into his house. Meanwhile the imam had appeared. He frowned up at the speakers. Spotted the severed cable, peered around helplessly.
POLIC
E, ELECTRICIANS, thought Auhl, cursing. And Fanning wide awake.
He gave it half an hour, concealed in the trees above the villa, occasionally sipping from a water bottle. Watching for the arrival of servants or visitors. Then, drawing on latex gloves, he moved at a crouch downhill, into Fanning’s backyard, through the kitchen door.
Austerely white, mangosteens and rambutans in a wooden bowl, polished wooden floors, a small, glass-topped bamboo table. Finally an archway to a sitting room, also stark and modern. A massive home-theatre screen flickered, a game of soccer playing somewhere in the world, the sound off. A coffee table on a white rug, a chunky glass tumbler, an empty scotch bottle. The tropical fruit aside, Fanning might as well have been at home in Geelong.
A flicker in the corner of Auhl’s eye. A gecko, halfway up the wall, utterly still now, as if playing a game of statues with him. At the far end of the hallway, open glass doors led to a deck, shadowy under ferns and blowsy hanging baskets, where bamboo wind chimes sounded softly, licked by a hill breeze. A neighbouring house, a rice paddy beyond it; a man wandered through in bare feet, carrying a sickle. Auhl sensed a busy, populated landscape, even though he’d barely seen or heard anyone yet.
He listened, and presently followed a rattly snore to a bedroom midway along the hallway. Fanning sprawled asleep in his boxer shorts, head down, his backside aimed at the ceiling.
Between the toes, Auhl decided. He removed the syringe from his pocket, filled the barrel with the succinylcholine, gave a tiny preparatory squirt and went straight in, plunger depressed, ten mils, no messing about.
Fanning jerked awake at the sudden pain and thrashed around onto his back. He stared wild-eyed at Auhl, then reared up at him with a roar. Auhl stepped back. He said, ‘Intravenous would have been quicker, but I didn’t want to fart around trying to find a vein.’
Fanning wavered. He grunted, spasmed, flopped onto his back.
‘Even so, it’s quick-acting,’ Auhl said. He twinkled at Fanning. ‘It’s called sux. Appropriate, right? It mimics a heart attack.’ He leaned into the heavy, panicked face. ‘What’s that? You want to know why? Your daughter, arsehole. Your wife.’