by Philip Atlee
"We'll check the palace commandant again," said Hatta, rising. "Then the commander of Djokja, and phone the airport before going out."
We went walking down the arched hallway toward the back of the kraton. The courtyards were empty; the dancing girls had gone.
Harvard Frank was waiting for us at the back colonnade, sitting on his bag, and the driver of the black Mercedes sedan opened the back door as we approached. I was ducking into the car when shouting arose from the palace guards at the outside gateway; a soldier came sprinting across the stone-flagged enclosure toward us. Colonel Hatta listened to him, half into the car. Then withdrew and went walking toward the back gate.
Frank got into the front seat beside the driver, and I lounged in the back with sweat trickling down from my hairline and sluicing from my armpits. There was already a whitish rime staining my freshly laundered shirt. Hatta came back, got in beside me, and at his sharp order the sedan rolled out of the back gateway.
"A blind beggar," said Hatta briefly. "He had been paid to tell us that the njotija balunda was at Borobodur. Waiting for us."
***
She was, too. It took less than an hour of scrambling over the huge monument, checking all the stupas still open and those under scaffolding, to find her. Borobodur was deserted, without even a guard, because the restoration work had been called off when the revolution flared across Central Java. The guards had been withdrawn.
She was near the top, sitting cross-legged and serene as any goddess, her betraying bright hair covered by a coronet of scarlet hibiscus blossoms. The inverted chalice of the stupa shadowed the other garlands of blood-drenched flowers around her slender neck, bared breasts, and curving torso. She had been sliced to death by skillful kris slashes, and the fresh flowers jammed into her cuts. When I leaned down to close the lids over her blue eyes, she toppled over on me in one final, cold embrace.
I carried her out of there, too. Down the terraces of the decaying shrine, and when I reached the car, Hatta had a tarpaulin ready. We wrapped her in it and put her on the floor of the Mercedes' back seat. Then, since we were all traveling men, we rolled back toward Djokjakarta and out the airport road.
The plane was waiting, and we loaded Katja and our other baggase and took off for Semarang.
TWENTY-TWO
THE FLIGHT FROM DJOKJAKARTA TO SEMARANG is not a long one, and the three of us-Colonel Hatta, Harvard Frank, and I-spoke very little during it. After we heard the intercom crackle up ahead and felt the plane bank as it entered a landing pattern, I stared down over the leading edge of the wing. At the sliding architecture of Semarang and the blue expanse of the Java Sea.
"Why her?" I asked Hatta. "They could have sent the same committee for Frank or myself."
"No." He shook his head. "You two were… interlopers. You stood out like sore thumbs. She was deep in it; I do not know exactly how. I had never met her before, but I was never very important, you know. Just a dogsbody for the others. But she was involved. Did you know she spoke Indonesian fluently, and in several dialects?
"Yes. And she turned the key on Sukarno, you know. She really did. The coup was in doubt until she led you to Lubang Buaja and you saw the generals stuffed into the well. Now Aidit, the leader of PKI, the Communist Party, is running, trying to hide. Hundreds of thousands of his followers are being dragged out of their homes and butchered, just as the loyal generals were."
I stared at him as the wing went down, and the plane leveled on its final landing leg. "That one report, what she took me to see, can't have been that important."
Hatta strapped on his seat belt. "Perhaps not. It accelerated things, however. Even more important, she gave you the hastily pulled front-page proof of the leading Communist newspaper. Do you think that was an accident?"
"I don't know," I said, and latched my own seat belt. The runway was rushing up at us. "Why did they hack her up like that, with the garlands of flowers? That's not a Marxist revenge."
The wheels touched down and buckled over craters in the runway as our airspeed diminished. Hydraulic systems squawked. Involuntarily my right foot reached for the brakes, which were nowhere near me. Hatta unlatched his seat belt and sighed.
"It sounds arbitrary, Josef, to say that the people in these three-thousand-odd islands are a different breed of cat. From the cold logic of either Peking or Moscow. But we are. Katja Arnkloo died the way she did because her defilement and entombment were Oriental extensions of a Balinese ritual called tandakken. In it, the dancers go into trance and slash themselves with ceremonial krisses."
"I have heard of it," I said. "The trance is self-induced."
His thin face turned toward me and the dark eyes were direct. "True. But afterward the cuts are always lined with fresh flower blossoms. I do not expect you to understand."
The plane had swerved off the runway and was taxiing toward the Semarang Air Terminal.
"All right," I said. "But what about you?"
The plane swung around to park, and Colonel Abdul Hatta bowed across the aisle to me. "A good question, Tuan. What about me?"
"Couldn't this be dangerous for you, shipping the bullion out?"
"Yes, Joe," the handsome Indonesian officer said. "But it is a chance I have to take. If Aidit's people seized it, they could arm a full division."
He shrugged, and as we stood up in the aisle the boarding door was opened and heat billowed into the plane.
TWENTY-THREE
THE JUNK LEFT SEMARANG HARBOR UNDER diesel power, her slat sails furled. Near-gale-force winds were bending the palm trees almost double, lashing them around furiously, slamming against the high sheer of the Chinese vessel. Captain Ling, wearing a baseball cap and torn trousers, went from the bridge to the wheelhouse, bellowing orders at his drenched Chinese crewmen, who all wore safety lines.
When we had cleared the harbor and were sure the storm's fury would not drive us into anything dangerous, Ling battened everything down. After consulting with Harvard Frank, very stern and nautical in his new, gold-braided yachting cap, the Chinese skipper let the plunging junk run with the wind, under bare poles. I fought my way down to the forward hold and lashed the tarpaulin that held Katja's body securely. When the weather broke a little, I knew we had to do something else about her; ice-packing, probably. But I did not know the vessel's facilities. And we had been pretty busy clearing Semarang.
For the rest of the afternoon and night I tried to sleep in the exotically appointed stateroom, with its teak furniture and red-lacquered walls. It was a losing fight, because the big junk kept horsing wildly, and occasionally a wind-change hit it abaft abeam and we rolled nearly over. Finally I decided the hell with it, and attempted to get stoned.
Even that relatively simple procedure seemed to require a man with five hands, because the gimbaled water carafe and glasses flung out their contents when you weren't looking. That left only the simple expedient of drinking from the bottle, and without a safety belt you could lose some teeth that way, while levitating.
I must have managed it, however, because when I finally awakened and opened a porthole, the junk was pitching gently over a white-capped Java Sea. I de-furred my teeth with some difficulty, smiled wanly at the beat-up visage in the mirror (the one with the bloodshot blue eyes), and staggered down to the main salon. Harvard Frank was working on an enormous breakfast, still wearing his elegant yachting cap, and he gave me a cheery matutinal greeting.
When he asked what I would have, I said coffee with a side order of ground glass laced with strychnine. He laughed, arose and crossed the salon, and threw open two carved panels behind the bar. Behind them, secured in tantalus racks, were rows and rows of bottles.
"Name your medication," he said. "It's all here."
I decided to try him out. "Just bring back a bottle of Fernet Branca, Captain Ahab."
"Inmediatamente, senor!" he replied. And from a huge cluster of keys he extracted one and unlocked a tantalus frame. Removing a liqueur bottle, he opened it deftly and set it on th
e table before me. It was the original, herb-strengthened surcease.
"Boy!" he cried, clapping his hands. A smiling Chinese steward appeared, bowing, and Harvard Frank told him to bring more coffee. Hot coffee, steaming coffee. "Chop-chop!"
Chop-chop? I poured a shot of the Fernet Branca and put it down whole, staring at Frank with rheumy eyes. The Ivy League bastard had bought a junk made in Hong Kong, so he was automatically an old China Hand? But the herbal beneffcience was exploding balm in my gut. After three more shots of it and some coffee I felt like sitting up and taking solid nourishment.
After I had finished breakfast, I broached the matter of Katja's probable decomposition to Frank, and he said no problem. That the junk had a walk-in freezing room, so we went down and transferred her. I still felt a little queasy, and since I have never trusted Chinese cooks anyway, I determined to search all my food for blond hair.
We had a stiff following wind and the junk fled before it with all her sails set. Watching the sea slide by, I could understand how these seemingly ungainly vessels, four-masted, with multilayered plank hulls and crews of several hundred men, had sailed as far as the East Coast of Africa in the thirteenth century. They roamed the China Sea and called regularly at Ceylon, India, and Arabia.
Frank and I were sitting in deck chairs on the high, raking bow of the junk, having a yardarmer, when the submarine surfaced on our starboard side and fired a warning shot across our bow. Frank lunged up, overturning his glass, but I grabbed him by the shoulder and sat him back down. Water combed off the sub's stubby conning tower and revealed the red- and white-barred flag of the Republic of Indonesia.
By her emerging silhouette, I knew the vessel was an overage Russian submarine. One of the junk fleet, including a cruiser, that the Kremlin had unloaded on Sukarno. When the conning-tower hatch opened, and crewmen began pouring out to unshroud the forward guns, I told Frank to have Captain Ling heave the junk to. Since the sails were electrically operated, this was soon done, and the junk lost way rapidly.
Frank was blazing with anger. "If those bastards damage us, I'll see them in the dock at the United Nations!" he shouted.
"Steady on, old friend," I counselled. "The country that flag represents hasn't belonged to the United Nations for some time. And if they sink us, they'll just submerge again and go back to Surabaja. Nobody will ever know what happened. I think the phrase is, death at sea by misadventure."
"Can't we do anything?" he demanded.
"Certainly," I said. "Tell Ling to haul up the keel, right now. Then come back and have another drink while they board and search us."
He looked at me, beat his gold-braided cap against his thigh, and went off cursing toward the wheelhouse. I sipped my drink, watching the small launch being put over the side of the submarine, and felt a steady tremor through the heavy deck planking as the electric windlasses hoisted the junk's huge keel. The vessel was built with a huge slot dividing her from arching bow to stern, and it was into this aperture that the keel was being lifted.
As the submarine's launch came pitching toward us, and boarded, I reflected that Colonel Hatta had sung. Or someone else I did not know about had revealed to Djakarta the secret of the bullion treasure slung on the junk as a drop keel. The launch had brought two officers and a team of four undersea divers. After rounding up the crew and Ling, at Sten-gun point, they left them grouped around our deck chairs and searched the junk from one end to the other.
It was proof of their efficiency that they never even discovered Katja's tarp-wrapped body in the freezer room. Or perhaps they did and concluded that we were keeping her on ice for some purpose not related to their search. At any rate, the officer in charge did not comment on her presence.
When they were sure that the five tons of gold and silver were not hidden above the waterline of the junk, the rubber-suited divers fitted on their flippers and faceplates and jumped over the side. They spent two hours combing the Chinese vessel below, were hauled out, and reported no success. I suppose the dumb bastards must have thought that unsymmetrical bulge was a keel goiter.
While the boarding crew from the Indonesian submarine prepared to depart, Harvard Frank harangued their officers with such impassioned protest that I thought he might get us shot out of sheer nuisance value. He orated in clipped philippics against highhanded seizure in international waters, while I sat shaking the dwindling ice cubes in my glass.
Hoping against hope that he Would be struck by lightning or have a massive stroke. No way to blame him, of course. He had no way of knowing that what the Indonesians had boarded his fine new toy to recover-a treasure belonging to their government worth millions of dollars-was actually aboard. So he ranted on.
The Indonesian officers apologized politely, while he pointed out that he was flying the British flag and was under Hong Kong Registry. They got back into the launch and returned to their submarine. The conning-tower hatch closed after them and they submerged and started back toward base in their ancient Soviet undersea boat.
TWENTY-FOUR
BURT HOLROYD, THE TOKYO STATION chief, was waiting on the pier when we docked at Yokohama, and for the first time I learned the full extent of the ill wind that had blown us out of Java.
Aidit, the PKI Communist Party leader, had gone underground, running for his life. Colonel Abdul Hatta, my friend, had been summarily executed. While Holroyd told me about these things, sitting in the junk's elaborate salon, I sighed and remembered General Suharto's dour efficiency. General Nasution had surfaced from his hiding place, and Sukarno, the charismatic leader and international lecher, was said to be under house arrest in the Bogor Palace.
Foreign Minister Subandrio, Generals Dhani and Supardjo, and Lieutenant Colonel Untung were in the military prison in Djakarta, charged with treason. Dalam, the Governor of the Indonesian State Bank, was with them, and the same capital charge had been placed against him.
This was all informative stuff but not particularly novel. Just what happens when your side goes for broke and loses. I was fixing us another drink when Holroyd said that what had happened since the junk left Semarang was undoubtedly one of the greatest organized massacres in history. I didn't follow that and, frowning, turned to hand him his drink.
"What are you talking about?"
"Some estimates are that half a million Indonesian Communists have been slaughtered in the purge following the failure of the Untung coup."
"That's goddamned nonsense!" I said. "With the military forces split the way they were, it was logistically impossible."
"The military didn't do it," said Holroyd. "The people did it. In the cities, the villages, and the kampongs. It was triggered at the funeral of Nasution's five-year-old daughter; there the word went out through the Moslem vouch groups. 'Sikat!' was the whisper. 'Sweep!'
"They swept all right. The population came out shooting, stabbing, and hacking away with krisses: a whole nation ran amok. In the Javanese coastal town of Tjirebon a crude guillotine was set up and chopped off Communist heads for several days. No one knows how many bodies were dumped into the underground river at Wonosari, near Djokjakarta: they were sucked into the dark current and swept out to sea.
"A deputation of armed citizens approached the Japanese manager of the new hotel in Djokja and demanded the use of two of his big refrigerator trucks. Several days later the drivers of the trucks came back to him. complaining that they were being forced to haul Communist corpses. In Bali alone, over a hundred thousand of Aidit's followers were killed in a week…"
"All right!" I said. "Okay." I was stunned. Banana republic revolts where the outs fired off all their ammo before it got hot, and then ran like hell, were one thing. But this bloodbath had been Hitlerian in scope…
"We had a country team in there, you know," added Holroyd dryly. "But you just knifed past everybody and broke the ball game wide open…"
"Shut up your mouth!" I shouted fiercely, wheeling on him. "Don't even try to unload this lumber on me. I was sent in there like the vil
lage idiot on a simple smuggling contract, which I executed before the fucking roof caved in. I told you that I didn't like the smell of it before I left Tokyo. And if I had hooked up with your 'country team,' I'd be dead by now."
Holroyd held up both hands in supplication. "Subject closed," he said. "I've got a hearse waiting on the dock. Where do you want Katja Arnkloo's body sent?"
"I don't know," I said. "When we get to Tokyo, I'll cable her parents. They live in Malmo, Sweden."
He nodded, said he would go talk to the hearse people, and would meet me in the car. I got my stuff together, and went down the companionway to Harvard Frank's huge Ming Dynasty cabin. We shook hands and said good-bye with the bright, false camaraderie of people who, after sharing a jolting time, had exposed themselves too much to each other. He thought me ruthless, and I thought him a clever fop and brown-noser. On that "see-you-around" note, we parted without regret.
Holroyd was waiting in his car and we didn't talk much on the drive back to Tokyo. After we had circled the business district and were nearly to Haneda Airport, I asked him how Katja had gotten in so deep.
"She was one of his doxies. Sukarno's, I mean. Several years ago, on one of his round-the-world tours, he chartered a big jet from SAS. She was chief stewardess on it, and after they had flown together from city to city and bed to bed, he paid her off as he had so many others. Through Dalam, head of the Indonesian State Bank, he gave her import licenses on a number of items manufactured in Sweden. The licenses must have been worth at least $400,000.
"But this kid wasn't just another whore. She had plans for setting up a real killing; that was the reason she wangled the UNESCO job in Paris. When she got to Java with the restoration mission, hot-nuts Sukarno wouldn't see her. I guess he thought she had had her whack and that to crank the affair up again would be crapping too close to the palace. At any rate, he shut her out, and Dalam wouldn't see her, either.