Monkeys in the Dark

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  The physician to whom Sinclaire had taken Alex in the middle of the night was Dr Tan, a man who on several occasions in the past two years had saved Sinclaire from embarrassment. He had reassured Sinclaire that night; he did so again the next afternoon when he arrived to see Alex, driving a battered white Morris. Dr Tan could have afforded a white Rolls Royce, but he was a man of discretion. His family was discreetly leaving Indonesia: two children were being educated in Australia, two in America, and one son was a revolutionary worker in the Forever Sunrise Preserved Food Factory in Shanghai. Dr Tan would visit his children in due course, to decide with which one he should live. Meanwhile he drove about in his old white car and did not lose his temper when Indonesian customs officials confiscated his shipments of penicillin and insulin and sold them at high prices to the public hospital. Alex, he said, had neither malaria nor dengue, merely a forty-eight hour virus, aggravated by lack of sleep and, perhaps, a glass or two of wine.

  ‘But I think, Mr Anthony, something else is troubling you?’

  Dr Tan adjusted his spectacles and folded his hairless hands in his lap. He waited in silence. He enjoyed these moments of teasing Mr Anthony, who was himself a very great tease. Right now Mr Anthony was vulnerable, for clearly he had some particular question about this lady’s state of health, some delicate worry.

  Dr Tan spoke quietly, as if speaking to himself. ‘In my experience a fever, even a moderate one, in the first weeks of pregnancy almost invariably results in spontaneous miscarriage. If not, to allow the pregnancy to continue is contra-indicated.’ He allowed Sinclaire to pace up and down the sitting room for some minutes before he spoke again. ‘However, this patient is not pregnant, so we don’t have to consider such problems,’ he added in a normal voice.

  Sinclaire turned quickly. ‘Bless you, Dr Tan. Bless all the Tans.’

  At the front door Sinclaire said, ‘There is one other thing. I may, in a week or so, have to give the lady some unfortunate news. Would an emotional shock be dangerous for her? Could it cause some … relapse?’

  Dr Tan smiled. ‘I must repeat that she is a healthy and strong young woman. She has become over-tired and has drunk too much alcohol for this hot weather and she has a virus. Physically, there is nothing for her to relapse into—no underlying weakness. But an emotional shock? People are affected by such things in different ways. You, Mr Anthony, probably know better than I how she will react. Please feel free to call me if you are worried.’

  They made small bows to each other then Dr Tan’s little black shoes went twinkling down the path towards his battered car.

  Alex was asleep again; Sinclaire gave final instructions to the workmen and the servants, wrote Alex a note telling her she had collapsed after Claude’s party, and left. He drove to the Hotel Indonesia.

  On the terrace, not far from the entrance to the Ramayana Bar, was the Java Room Coffee Shop. It served ‘international’ food which in Europe would have excited patrons to lynch the chef, but it had a pleasantly distracting view. A barricade of shrubs in pots enclosed an area of the terrace outside the Java Room where one could sit on decorative white chairs, watching the jeeps, bicycles and Mercedes driving round the lily pond at the base of the Welcome Monument, the beggars hanging around the gates, the touts harassing foreign visitors who were trying to go for a walk, and the charming girls, down from Singapore, Bangkok and Hong Kong, making their way towards the swimming pool. The girls were all politely referred to as ‘air hostesses’; some of them were. A couple Sinclaire knew stopped and joined him for coffee. They had just arrived from Singapore and had a copy of that morning’s Straits Times.

  ‘Look at this!’ they said.

  The stop-press carried two paragraphs about the murder of the vice-president of the Japanese Hardwood Importers’ Association. The second paragraph read: ‘The other attack victim, a prominent Indonesian businessman, is in a satisfactory condition. Police have issued a description of the suspects.’

  ‘It’s Sutrisno,’ the girls said. ‘We heard coming down on the plane.’

  ‘Who did it?’ Sinclaire asked.

  The girls were Hakka Chinese. They exchanged glances.

  ‘Triad.’

  ‘Yes, triad. Very professional. They cut the Jap’s throat.’

  ‘Must be triad.’

  By that night, when Sinclaire went for a drink at the Ramayana Bar, everybody was talking about it. The wire service correspondents had the most recent information, gleaned over the telephone from their colleagues in Singapore. Sutrisno and the Japanese had emerged from a seafood restaurant down near the docks in Singapore, and were standing on a street corner not far from the restaurant, trying to hail a taxi. The area was ill-lit and both men were speaking English. Somebody called out, ‘Hey, Pak Trisno’ and the Japanese had looked round. Sutrisno was concentrating on looking for a taxi, and had not at first heard himself called. There was a noise beside him; he turned to see that a man had grabbed the Japanese from behind. Sutrisno tried to run, but had himself been grabbed from behind. He had clamped his chin down as hard as he could against his chest and had fallen limp on to the pavement. His assailant had been thrown off balance. He drew his knife quickly across Sutrisno’s throat and fled. Sutrisno had been slashed from ear to ear, but shallowly: his jugular and windpipe had escaped. The Japanese, however, was already dead, with air whistling out of his throat.

  Sutrisno had been able to walk back to the restaurant. The police were anxious to question two men of Chinese appearance, about five feet five inches tall and armed with knives.

  Journalists had interviewed Sutrisno in hospital that morning. He did not know why the secret societies should wish to murder the vice-president of the Japanese Hardwood Importers’ Association. When the Ashai Shimbun correspondent had suggested that, as Sutrisno’s name had been the one called out by the assassins, perhaps he was the main object of the attack, the interview had been terminated. The Prime Minister of Singapore was known to be very upset and had sent a telegram of condolence to the Japanese Chamber of Commerce.

  Sinclaire listened to the gossip with professional interest. It was difficult to believe that Sutrismo was not the intended victim. But whether he were or not, he had had the misfortune to be involved in a shameful incident. Singapore face had been lost. And trade through Singapore was very important to the New Order. It meant that Sutrisno could no longer be favoured civilian son to the Indonesian Army. And further, that the West would have to find a new go-between.

  ‘Poor Trisno,’ Sinclaire said. ‘I wonder how hell survive?’

  ‘He’ll survive,’ the APA man said. ‘That critter will survive Armageddon.’

  That night Sinclaire rang Eileen Wan. Her landlady told him that people had been ringing Eileen all day, but that she had gone to Jogjakarta and that if she did not come back soon there would be no option but to break the lock on her door, for she had left lights burning inside the pavilion and electricity was not cheap.

  On Monday afternoon Sutrisno, with his throat still hidden in bandages, was flown home to Djakarta escorted by a member of Indonesian military intelligence. That evening the police broke in to Eileen’s pavilion. The small sitting-room was perfectly tidy, as it always was, but a smell of incense hung in its air. The door to the bedroom was locked, as was also usual if Eileen were going away. The police broke the lock on that door, too. As they tried to push the door open there was a ripping noise, and an overpowering stench of incense hit them. Brown wisps of smoke seeped through the breaking door. The policemen began to retch as they put their shoulders to the door to break it down. They had to stagger back from the buff-coloured cloud of smoke that billowed from the room.

  The smoke was coming from a pole of incense smouldering in an urn on the floor, its fragrance barely disguising the frightful smell of a corpse. The smell had not been detected sooner because the windows had been locked and the door cracks sealed with tape. Everything in the room was covered with the incense-soot—the pictures of Jesus and the god in th
e gilt frame were defaced with it.

  Eileen had been dead several days and she had taken on the colour and shape of a baby whale. The colour, as the autopsy later revealed, was due more to the poison she had taken—a massive overdose of her father’s heart pills—than to decomposition. A letter to her father, explaining her plan and apologising for failure, was beside her on the bed. Small packages, addressed to friends, were set out on the dressing-table.

  The police had to search through the downtown warrens, where most Chinese lived, to find her mother, a tired, pale woman who had only been Second Wife to Towkay Wan and who had not been clever in business, like her daughter.

  Naida, to whom Eileen had bequeathed one of her finest jades, accompanied Second Wife Wan to the morgue and the police station and airline offices: the woman could not speak Indonesian, nor could she write in Roman script. It became known that Sutrisno was paying for the special coffin in which Eileen’s remains were to be flown to Hong Kong, where Towkay Wan would bury her.

  ‘Surely an ironic gesture by Sutrisno,’ Alex remarked to Sinclaire. They were taking their morning coffee together in the Press Office.

  For two days the city had talked of the murder-suicide and its implications: the murder by mistake of a distinguished Japanese businessman was an unfortunate way for the collapsed Indonesian economy to re-enter international trade, as the Hong Kong, Thai and Philippines newspapers had all remarked. There were even stories about the Wan Affair in the Djakarta newspapers, taking up space normally devoted to political speeches and warnings against subversive elements.

  At foreign parties scandal created a festival atmosphere—the Affair vied with other gossip: wild surmise about the Ashby separation and Meredith Synge’s trip to Manila. Odd she should go tripping, people said, just when her husband was about to come out of hospital. As for the Ashbys, people had doubted—as early as Sunday morning—that Thornton was being evacuated to Australia on medical grounds. He had looked quite well at the airport, although he had been wearing dark glasses. By Sunday night everyone had known that Julie was filing for divorce on grounds of cruelty and that Ambassador Andrews had accepted Thornton’s resignation from External Affairs. ASIO officers were waiting for Thornton at Darwin airport, people said.

  Alex had listened to it all with a sense of loss. Awful as Thornton was, he had been in some undefinable way her ally in misfortune; in time, they might even have become friends.

  Meanwhile there were whispers that two Chinese shops in Djakarta had been stoned, following the Wan Affair, and KOPKAMTIB had announced that disruptive elements would be shot.

  ‘Trisno beat Eileen, but only through physical strength,’ Sinclaire said. ‘If he weren’t such a ball of muscle he would certainly have been killed. And it was just luck that the triad at first mistook the Japanese for him. On wits alone, I’d award the prize to Eileen. Anyway, she must be shrieking with joy, now, wherever Chinese go after honourable deaths. Since the full story of how he cheated Wan has come out, there’s not a Chink between here and the Gobi Desert who’ll do business with Sutrisno. And the Japanese aren’t too enamoured, either. But he’ll think of something. He’ll be born again, the bastard … When are you going to see him about Maruli, by the way?’

  ‘This evening,’ Alex said. ‘Not that he’ll have much time for my problems, after all this.’

  Sinclaire gave her a crooked smile. ‘Well, I still have. Give me a few more days.’

  Alex stood on Sutrisno’s doorstep looking at the gorgeous fish gliding in a ballet around the tank let into his front wall. She had no idea what she was going to say to him. Her mind went blank with rage when she recalled how cynically he had wished to use her, setting her up for the amiable General Djaya. On the other hand, he had arranged for her to learn quickly about Maruli’s arrest. Was that an act of compassion? Or was it a crow of victory? When she had first met Sutrisno she had thought of him merely as a peasant who had gouged his way to the top, whose every thought and gesture was a vulgarity, contemptible. But even Maruli had admired him, once. And the terrible thing that had been done to him during the Revolution, when he was only a boy of nineteen or twenty, explained, if not excused, his viciousness.

  A servant answered the doorbell.

  ‘Bapak is still praying. Please come in.’

  She looked around at the animals Sutrisno had killed. The young Sumatran tiger—so inexpertly stuffed that it was shaped like a salami—was a particular affront. Alex had told Maruli once that she was a member of the World Wildlife Federation, which was attempting to protect the Sumatran tiger. ‘Are there tigers in Australia?’ he had said, then added, ‘My uncle was killed by a tiger when he was walking to the market. A corpse left by a tiger is a frightening sight—worse than a machine-gun attack, I can tell you.’

  Alex looked away from the sausage, with its glass eyes and permanently roaring mouth. Other creatures were staring at her—gibbons, sloths, a pair of mongooses and a rhinoceros head on a wooden plaque on the wall. The Sumatran rhinoceros was also a threatened species.

  The servant returned with tea and cakes.

  ‘That is a rhinoceros,’ he said. ‘Its oil is very useful.’

  Alex nodded. Rhinoceros oil was a panacea for everything from acne to kidney stones; the ground-up horn of the beast made old men virile and its urine could cure something else—boils? cancer? Alex had heard it all a dozen times, from Poppy, from the embassy drivers, from Naida, from people in shops.

  ‘The oil can cure …’

  ‘I know it can,’ Alex said firmly. The servant bowed and withdrew.

  A second man entered the sitting room. Alex thought at first he was another servant, then recognised Sutrisno’s strutting walk. He was bare-footed and wearing the sarong in which he had been praying; his great crest of hair was hidden beneath his prayer cap. His throat was still bandaged.

  Seeing the bandage Alex felt a pang of sympathy. For the first time he seemed fully human, even dignified.

  ‘Trisno!’ she said. Then, in Indonesian, ‘How are you? How are you feeling?’ She felt ashamed that she had not thought of bringing him a gift—any Indonesian visiting her when she was ill would have brought one.

  He sat down slowly, allowing the sarong to make a hammock between his knees, the way the fruit sellers in the markets did.

  ‘I am alive,’ he said. ‘It is the will of God that I should live.’ He smiled faintly.

  They sat in polite, Javanese silence.

  Then Sutrisno said, ‘You want to ask me about Hutabarat. I tell you, Alex, I hate him. He is a mad dog, and he should be shot, like a mad dog. I was very happy to hear he had been arrested …’

  Alex half-stood, ready to leave.

  ‘However, if you want to contact him, bisa diatur. I know the governor of the gaol.’ Sutrisno was looking down; he sat as quietly and patiently as peasants sat.

  ‘He’s… alive?’

  Sutrisno made a gesture of irritation. ‘Of course he’s alive. He’s in Salemba prison. Do you think we just execute people, without trial? This government is trying to restore law and order. That is why Hutabarat was arrested. You Westerners come here and you see the soldiers and you think, “What would it be like in my country, with soldiers occupying the city?” and you get angry with us. But you don’t see what it was like before. You don’t know how we suffered, knowing our President was allowing the country to be bankrupted, permitting any excesses so long as he could stay President, be a god.’

  She nodded.

  ‘It will take a few days to arrange,’ Sutrisno continued. ‘Maybe next week. You make up a basket of food. They don’t get real good food in gaol. Put in tins, chocolate, some fruit. Then, I will take you there. Next week. Monday.’

  ‘Would I be able to talk to him?’

  Sutrisno sighed. ‘Maybe. Or you can write a note, in Indonesian. Don’t say anything silly in it. Just …. “Love, always thinking of you.” Something like that.’

  The interview was ended by Sutrisno’s silence
. Alex sat politely, in silence also for about a minute, then rose. Sutrisno followed her to the door. She wanted to tell him how sorry she was that he was in so much pain, that he had been disgraced, that she was grateful to him. She turned and saw the wooden-Indian face and the small, clever eyes.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and left.

  The American embassy was on the southern edge of Freedom Square, a large white building of several wings, set well back from the road behind a high steel fence. In the preceding decade thousands of Djakartans had, from time to time, thrown stones at it and burnt effigies of American Presidents in front of it. On other occasions they had burnt dozens of American motor cars. Indonesian soldiers guarded the gates of the embassy; the doors to the buildings itself, its foyer and corridors, were guarded by GIS.

  Sinclaire went to the embassy once a fortnight, asked at the information desk to see a certain First Secretary, stayed in that man’s room long enough to say, ‘Hullo’, then was ushered in to the CIA offices. How many CIA personnel there were in Djakarta nobody but the company itself knew. But there were certain people whose dress was loud, whose accents were not East Coast and whose hobbies were advertised as hunting, shooting and fishing. These were the overt officers, the persons to contact if one were intending to defect to the West or had an interesting document for sale. They also ran the CIA liaison work with other friendly intelligence services.

  ‘Here’s your stuff,’ Sinclaire’s liaison man said to him on Thursday morning. He tossed the military intelligence reports of Maruli’s arrest and interrogation across the desk. ‘He was as clean as a whistle when they picked him up. No printing press, no guns, no naughty books … They’re getting nothing new out of him in the interrogation, nothing we didn’t know already from your source.’

  ‘Can I keep this?’ Sinclaire asked.

  The liaison man gestured widely. ‘For an Aussie … ? Anything. Hey, have you heard the second-latest solution for Vietnam? Bomb it flat, cement it over and rent it to the Chinese as a car park.’