‘And the latest?’
‘The latest is better: Asian solution to Asian problem. We take all the citizens of Saigon up to the DMZ and let ‘em loose. They steal North Vietnam. You like that? For a kiss you can have it.’
Sinclaire left an hour later, carrying a well-stocked briefcase. When he arrived back at the Australian embassy he went straight to Greaves’s room and began to read the documents relating to Maruli. The procès verbal, the oral interrogation, covered forty pages of typed foolscap and represented two short sessions and one five-hour questioning of Maruli. Sinclaire winced as he read some of the questions: they were put by men of little education and Maruli’s answers showed contempt for his questioners. ‘Allow me to refresh your memories about the differences between communism and Sukarnoism,’ and ‘Of course I do not believe that the Chinese model of land-reform can be applied to Indonesia—the situation here regarding absentee landlordism is entirely different,’ Maruli had answered at times. He had refused to admit to the printing press. When they had shown him a document—a resumé of what the Americans had told them, based on Usman’s information—he had replied, ‘That is calumny. The boy who said those things went mad and was shot by the police.’ Worse than this, they had not got out of him the names of any cell controllers, which was what they really wanted to know. It was impossible to tell whether Maruli really did not know the identity of his controller, S, or whether he were being steadfast. From the sullen tone of some answers, Sinclaire guessed that Maruli was already being beaten during the interrogation.
Sinclaire had not finished reading the procès verbal when Alex rang on Greaves’s phone.
‘I’ve been looking for you all morning,’ she said. ‘Listen, I’ve found out where he is, and I’ll be able to go there with Sutrisno, with a food parcel. I’ve already bought tins and tins of stuff, and sweets. But I would particularly like to buy some durians—he’s very fond of them. You’ll have to help me pick them. I wouldn’t know what a good durian looked like.’
Sinclaire pulled a face at Greaves, who was sitting across the desk, reading the other CIA material. ‘Durians are only just coming into season. We’d better wait a week or so, until the good ones come in.’
‘A week is too long,’ Alex said. ‘I’m going next Monday … Have you heard anything yet?’
‘Not yet. But I expect to, soon. Maybe by the weekend.’
‘Good. You know Patrick Synge is arriving back tonight? Well he and I will be working flat-out all day tomorrow, and probably all day Saturday. I’ve got to brief him on what’s happened in the Press Office since he’s been away. We’ll probably have to work Saturday night, too. So let’s make it Sunday morning. We’ll go shopping then?’
‘Fine. I’ll call by your house at about ten,’ Sinclaire said, and slowly replaced the receiver, looking not at it, but at Greaves. ‘Sutrisno has promised to take Alex to the gaol.’
Greaves gave one of his alarming, plastic smiles. ‘That should convince her that she’ll never see the boy friend in one piece again. Good idea.’
‘Now you’re not thinking straight, Frank,’ Sinclaire replied. ‘It’s not you, not me who’s going to Salemba. It’s Alex. She’s modern. She’s got what’s known as a social conscience … You know what’ll happen? She’ll go to Salemba, see the hundreds of people trying to find their relatives, the kids looking for their mothers who’ve been arrested, the coppers all sitting around eating bakmi and taking no notice of them, just telling them to piss off or come back next month … And then she’ll see the cells—no beds, no dunnies, half the prisoners coughing with TB. And you know what’ll happen? She’ll do her block. I’d guess the story of Salemba could be all over the Age by the following week.’
‘She can’t do that. She’s working for the government. Anyway, she’d be expelled. That’s why those heroes from UPI and Reuters and AFP don’t write it—they’d be chucked out in twenty-four hours.’
‘Frank, she can resign from the embassy job. She’s been thinking of resigning already. Then she can fly home and write as a free-lance. It wouldn’t be breaking the Official Secrets Act. The timing would be marvellous: the anti-Vietnam thing just getting off the ground, kids burning their draft cards, the Left getting paranoid about “political” punishment. She’s in love with the guy, Frank. What better cause could there be for a journalist whose boy friend’s a political prisoner? Hell, she’s got contacts in newspapers and universities in all the eastern States. And a few in Canberra. You know who her godfather is.’
‘But he’s a right-wing Liberal …’
‘Of course he is. But they don’t trust the New Order yet. Sukarno’s still President—that’s all the pollies know and care about. That he’s President and that they hate his guts. The facts and details will get lost. All we’ll have is horror stories about Indonesia’s political prisoners.’ Sinclaire paused, then added, ‘I might write it m’self.’
He stood up and went to the window. In the courtyard below the drivers were fanning themselves with newspapers; it was too hot to do anything more. Greaves had his eyes shut and his hands, like bears’ paws, clamped on top of his head. This was his brooding position. Sinclaire himself was thinking that he should have considered Alex’s temperament before, when he had wangled her the job here. But, in normal circumstances, she would barely have been aware of the existence of political prisoners. She would have been going to parties, going to the islands, to the hills … That was all he had imagined, when he had ached to see her again.
Greaves broke the silence. ‘Young fella, she’s not to go to the prison. I’ll see Sutrisno and tell him why. But that’s only a temporary solution. She’s got a few brains. She knows where to go—she can talk her own way in, if she’s determined. So you’ve got to think of something better. Something that will turn her cold on the boy friend, so that she doesn’t care if he’s alive or dead or having his nuts buzzed with a little electricity to jog his memory. In short, so that she doesn’t want to go to the gaol.’
‘Frank, I’ve told her, James has told her, even Ashby told her, that the man is a fanatic. And violent if necessary. It was water off a duck’s back. He’s a sensitive intellectual, as far as she’s concerned.’
Greaves nodded. ‘Did you also tell her that all revolutionaries start out as sensitive intellectuals?’
They sat in silence for a while, then Greaves’s yellow eyes fixed on Sinclaire. ‘I’ve got it, Anthony. No good appealing to the lady’s mind. The big emotional chop is needed.’ Greaves stretched across the desk and gathered up the procès verbal. ‘Edit this, then give it to her. You can think up the sort of thing she would not like to read.’
Sinclaire’s wolf-mouth fell agape with pleasure.
‘I’m still one jump ahead of you, son,’ Greaves said modestly. ‘Old and decrepit as I am.’
Later that afternoon, while Sinclaire was rewriting the procès verbal, a bear’s hand fell on his shoulder. ‘Don’t forget atmosphere,’ Greaves said. ‘You’ll have to pick your time carefully.’
14
For the past few days the Djakarta sky had been growing paler and more feverish-looking. For an hour in the early morning it was a tender lilac colour, then it turned light blue and by mid-morning was drained white. The sun could not be seen: the whole sky was a glare of heat, and beneath it the city was hazed with red dust. The betjak drivers were too hot to look for customers and lay asleep in their cabs, with their bare limbs hanging over the sides. The city water supply operated only a few hours each day now, giving out tan trickles that had to be collected in basins and allowed to stand for hours until the mud would settle; the water was then poured off and boiled for drinking. Not even the poorest street-dwellers now dared to drink unboiled water.
Alex had two deep wells in her garden at which Itji and Aminah spent half their days pumping to bring up enough water for drinking, cooking, washing and flushing the lavatory. The new guard drew water for the garden, but despite his efforts the plants were becoming increasin
gly dispirited. Alex forced herself to go out into the garden one afternoon to give a few words of encouragement to the shrubs, but they wilted at her and she did not return. The dry season was too far advanced now to risk the long trip to the weekender islands, for the winds were freakish at this time of year and the Java Sea was full of gales. Whole embassies made for the hills on Friday afternoons.
On Saturday morning Alex and her boss, Patrick, rode into the embassy together watching the sky. Patrick was a tall, fleshy man with a red face and a loud laugh. Alex had known him briefly a few years earlier when he had been State Parliamentary correspondent on her newspaper. He had been marvellously good at the job, and by two o’clock in the afternoon, when he started work, his hangovers had abated. Duty-free booze and Djakarta’s endless parties had not been good for Patrick. Before catching hepatitis he had been well on the way to becoming a drunk, and what was left of his wits had been almost exclusively employed in covering up his mistakes. He was frustrating to work with; nevertheless, he was a comrade and Alex was fond of him.
‘I could choke Meredith,’ Alex had told Sinclaire the week before.
‘For making a worse fool of Patrick?’ he had replied.
Meredith was back from Manila now, but everybody knew what she had been doing there, and how much fun it had been.
‘Tell me something, Patrick,’ Alex said as they rode to work on Saturday morning. ‘Were things better when you visited here, back in the early sixties?’
‘Better?’ Patrick said vaguely, swivelling to look at her. His eyes were very blue and red-rimmed.
‘Anthony says there’s a siege mentality among the foreigners …’
Patrick snorted. ‘Sinclaire! Always got a phrase for everything.’ He stared out the window and fell silent. A cloud like a grey goblin was rearing in the southern sky.
As the day wore on the morning’s grey cloud became huge, reaching over the city with dark, thickened limbs.
‘That’s the rain,’ Patrick said. ‘Maybe it will rain tonight.’
But it didn’t.
On Sunday morning the sky was grey all over. Although the heat seemed slightly less, the humidity, inconceivably, was higher. Alex took a cold bath at eight o’clock and was wet with perspiration before she had finished drying herself. She wished she had suggested to Anthony that they go shopping at dusk: the markets would be stinking at that hour, but they would be cooler, and a lot of the market people would be asleep in their stalls, with their sarongs pulled over their heads, and would not shout ‘Ullo, Mister’ at her. As she shuffled through the clothes in her wardrobe, looking for something suitable to wear shopping, her hand came to an old canvas beach-bag on a hanger. She patted it. ‘Soon,’ she said. The bag gave a dull jingle of gold. Alex was not sure how she was going to arrange it, but she was convinced it was possible to buy Maruli out of gaol. ‘Bisa diatur,’ she told the beach-bag, and triumph filled her.
Triumph had seized her a week ago when, lying in bed and recovering from Dr Tan’s sleeping pills, the plan had first occurred to her. It had kept her in high spirits and full of energy since then. In front of Anthony and others who knew about Maruli she had been hard put to suppress her excitement. When Sutrisno had agreed to take her to the gaol she had looked modestly at her lap, the way a woman should, though she had felt like laughing out loud, like floating upwards, Suddenly she was back with Maruli and he was laughing out loud and crying ‘I’m flying!’ while she felt the pulse of his blood inside her.
When she and Sutrisno got to the gaol she would plead with Sutrisno to be introduced to his friend, the prison governor. And, then, though it might take weeks or months, the first bolt of the door would have been drawn. Prison governors were as badly paid as other civil servants.
‘Bisa diatur,’ she repeated now and, reaching past the bag that hid the necklace, made a space around the white Pucci dress so that it hung better. She would wear the dress tomorrow to Salemba, for she had calculated that even a colonel—or whatever rank the governor might be—would recognise a $300 dress when he saw one, and thoughts would come into his head.
She had chosen the most expensive items for Maruli’s food parcel since its contents would be searched and their cost noted. The early durians, which Itji said only Chinese could afford, would be a final touch. Once the decision was taken, the details seemed so easy. She had already booked a call to her Sydney sharebroker, to alert him to be ready to sell and to cable money to her account in Singapore. She had also questioned David about the size of cheques that the black-market lady would cash on short notice. ‘Up to ten grand on the spot, if she knows you,’ David had said. It would cost much less than that to rescue Maruli, Alex knew. People said that Eileen had contracted for Sutrisno’s life for only $80. A life, of course, was cheaper than liberty. Maruli’s passport and exit visa would cost some hundreds. And at the gaol the governor would need not only money for his own conscience, but also for the peace of mind of all of his subordinates who would discover that Maruli was being released. She would reason with the governor that, as Maruli was going into exile, the governor would be doing the New Order a good turn—saving it the expense of supporting Maruli.
By eight-thirty she was ready to go out; she began to feel fidgety. She thought of ringing Anthony to ask him to come over immediately, then remembered he played tennis with the Ambassador on Sunday mornings. She had played, too, for the first few weeks—until Maruli. She remembered now that she had forgotten to excuse her continuing absence to the Ambassador’s wife, who would no doubt be offended. She began to write a note of apology, then tore it up. She flicked through the Australian newspapers, then decided to paint her nails. By nine o’clock the day was more feverish and sticky. Mosquitoes settled on her arms and legs as soon as she sat down. She went into the garden, where the plants were dying and the frangipani trees were dropping ugly paddle-shaped leaves on the ground. The air hung still under the glaring metal sky.
Sinclaire had not played tennis that morning. He had lain in bed for some time, thinking, then when a servant had begun tidying around him had moved out to lie in the sitting-room. He had a Chinese bed there, carved with dragons and birds, which he had had converted to a settee. He lay on it, smoking panatellas and drinking glasses of coffee. Today was probably his last chance. If he failed, he saw his ability for affection frittering away. He would get married, of course; he would take his father’s place in the business, he would become richer. He would be clever and heartless and whoever he married would become heartless, too, in order to survive with him. She would spend his money on imported clothes and supporting the opera and on fashionable young painters who took drugs and who would sleep with her while he was at board meetings. It was the sort of fate that had overtaken his schoolfriends and Sinclaire was old enough to know that he was no less vulnerable. He had maintained his bachelorhood and had chosen to live abroad as a delaying tactic, hoping he might meet some foreign woman who would be different from the small group of potential wives available to him back home. But those women of his own caste he had come to know at business school in America, while he was banking in London and now, in Djakarta, he had found empty-headed, or filled with strong, unreasonable opinions. And the cheap clothes and gaucheries of the more ordinary girls had given him frissons of distaste. ‘Either they hate trade unionists or they bite their nails,’ Sinclaire had often thought.
He yearned for Alex. He yearned for her, as the Javanese put it, like the scabbard yearns for its keris, the king for his people. He yearned for her because she was his, his own, his kind—and yet, she was better, more worth having. She was not particularly intelligent, but she was brave: she would do the good thing, not the right thing. She had a lovely, haughty turn to her head, like all the Wheatfield girls, but unlike the others, who were more glamorous, she was compassionate. He knew that there was a sort of wisdom in her, an intuition to love. When he had imported her he had imagined he had months in which he could amuse her, be her guide, become her mentor once mor
e, and that slowly the wall of her distrust would break down. Like a sedulously-recruited agent, she would fall into his arms. The scabbard would swallow its keris.
Sinclaire glanced at his watch. He had only a few hours left now, and he wondered, as he had often wondered in the past weeks, if he still loved Alex. He thought he probably did not. But she was essential to him. It was a kind of love, he supposed. In time, when she trusted him again, his soul might go out to hers, unguarded.
He picked up the large manila folder that contained the procès verbal and took it with him to the bathroom where he washed and shaved and carefully combed his fringe over the thin part above his forehead. I must try to get fat, Sinclaire thought. I’d look more reliable if I were fat.
He arrived at Alex’s house on the dot of ten, driving his private car, a yellow Mercedes. He stopped in the driveway and before getting out blared the first few bars of the Colonel Bogey March on his horn. Alex came out to the front verandah.
‘Anthony! Stop that frightful noise!’
‘Didn’t you know that the novelty horn is the status symbol? All the best generals are getting them. After you’ve got your stuffed tiger and your bar and your plastic orchids, you get a horn on your Merc that can wolf whistle or play music. Really, Alex, you are out of touch with Djakarta high society.’
‘Shut up and move over.’
‘You’ve hurt my feelings,’ Sinclaire said. He pecked her on the cheek as she got into the front seat beside him. ‘Have you brought nose-pegs? You will not believe how disgustingly durians reek, until you smell them. They are an affront to civilised manners.’
Alex made a wry face. ‘You’re very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning.’
‘I’m rather looking forward to the durians. How many do you want to buy for himself?’
‘Two or three.’
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