Captiva df-4

by Randy Wayne White

  Obviously, Tullock had paid. The question was: When had Rengat told him, and how much could he know?

  To Lieutenant Suradi, Tullock said, "Tell me something. How are people who make false accusations treated in Sumatra? I'll cooperate, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let this guy get away with calling me a thief. I've got business interests in this country." Letting the cops know that he was an important man; a man with connections.

  Suradi said, "It very serious, sahr. Yes, very serious. Mr. Ford wrong, maybe we take him to jail. You charge him, we do it, yes sahr." The little man was glaring at me, giving me one last chance to back down.

  Tullock made a sweeping motion with his hand. "In that case," he said, "search all you want."

  Suradi was still looking at me. I thought it over. Thought: What the hell. I nodded at the lieutenant. Said, "The man's a thief. Search his room."

  Tullock had pulled on a dry T-shirt. He took a chair across from me, dabbing at his face with a towel as Suradi and Prajurit began to politely lift and poke their way through drawers and luggage. It was a large, sparsely furnished room. Hard brown linoleum floor, an open window that looked out over the city, off-white walls decorated only with two small paintings done in the gaudy colors of a cheap valentine card. Both paintings were weirdly abstract—one of a dark-faced girl, her hands extended in an Egyptian-like pose; the other was of a cart pulled by water buffalo. Cart and oxen—it caused the image of Hannah's face to flash into my mind.

  "You tell me what you're looking for, maybe I can help." Tullock was sitting there, projecting indifference. His chair was against the open window. There was a floor lamp and a closet door to his left.

  I told him, "You'll know when they find it," but I was thinking: If it starts to unravel, I'll shove him through the window.

  "Ah-h-h," he said. "So it's going to be like that. I don't suppose you'd tell me when this supposed theft occurred?"

  Suradi and Prajurit were leaving the conversation to us, just doing their jobs, not very happy about it.

  "Yesterday," I said. "Late afternoon—just after the muezzin called the prayer."

  "You mean that noise they blast over the streets?" Tullock had his legs crossed. He was a foot tapper—the only symptom of nervousness in the otherwise shielded demeanor of a bureaucrat who was probably seasoned by years of long meetings and public hearings. His foot continued to tap as he said, "In that case, I couldn't have done it, because that's when I take my daily run."

  "Your running partner can confirm that?"

  His foot slowed momentarily . . . then resumed its normal pace. "I had thousands of partners. Out there on the streets. They remember men who look like you and me, Ford. We all probably look alike to them."

  Little did he know.

  I said, "You were never alone, Ray? I seldom see anyone in the parks along the Deli River."

  Tullock's foot began to lose speed . . . then stopped. He leaned toward me slightly and for a moment, just a moment, I could see the craziness that was in him. "You've made a terrible mistake, buddy. You have no idea just how deep the hole is you're digging—you should have done some reading before you came. I know about this country."

  I said, "Ray, I've made mistakes that were a hell of a lot bigger than this. Mistakes I'm going to regret for the rest of my life. Like that bomb you left for me? I made a mistake and it ended up killing Hannah."

  Slowly, very slowly, the color of his face changed from brown to red, and then to gray: Hawkeye's sidekick after hearing some shocking news. "You're . . . you're lying," he whispered.

  "I wish I were. The mistake I made was not realizing just how scrambled your brain really is."

  He had both feet on the linoleum now, both hands on the armrest. "She's not dead, she can't be dead. I put that thing—" He caught himself in time; realized that the two Indonesian cops had stopped their search and were listening. He sat back. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

  "What I'm talking about, Ray, is what you stole from me." I used my head to gesture toward Lieutenant Suradi. In his hand he was holding the small opaque green ball that I had already described to him . . . and which I had just watched him remove from the open drawer of a dresser. To the lieutenant, I said, "That's it. He must have taken it from my room when I was out. It's extremely valuable."

  "That's not his, it's mine! Don't you see what he's doing?" Tullock was on his feet now, beginning to lose it. Also getting some very hard looks from the cops. He forced himself to pause . . . took a very deep breath, fighting hard to recover. Actually managed to give Suradi a little smile as he said, "What if I prove that glass ball belongs to me? Will that make you happy?"

  Lieutenant Suradi said in a chilly, formal voice, "He tell us it's here. We find it."

  "But it was in my room all along! He's trying to make fools of you. I'll show you—" Tullock hustled over to his briefcase and pulled out a sheet of long pinkish paper, the color of a legal document in Sumatra. "I was expecting him to pull something like this. At the suggestion of my Japanese associates, I had their secretary list everything that I brought into the country. Everything I have in this room. See?" Tullock was showing them the paper. "It's listed right here. See this? 'Green glass ornament.' I carry it as a good luck charm." Gave the tone just the right inflection—an innocent admission of silliness made by an innocent man.

  Now Suradi and Prajurit had turned their cold stares on me. My expression said, Oh, shit. . . .

  Tullock pressed the advantage. "The man's trying to frame me. Look at his face! He's trying to set me up—"

  "What's the date on that list?" I asked Suradi.

  He checked it. "Dated . . . two . . . no, three days ago." I watched his eyes shift from the paper to me. "You robbed yesterday, sahr. That's what you say."

  I thought about how nice it would be to shake Rengat by the neck.

  "They could have postdated it. The date on that paper means nothing."

  Tullock had made a full recovery now. "I'm afraid it's your word against mine, sport. My word and the word of my business associates. All very respectable Japanese businessmen." He slapped the paper. "Listed right here in black and white."

  I stood, took the bandanna from my pocket and wiped the sweat from my forehead. "May I see the glass ball?"

  Suradi hesitated, then handed it to me.

  "I guess I could have made a mistake, but it's very similar." I motioned to the floor lamp. "Can you pull that over so I can see a little better?" I stuffed the bandanna back in my pocket as I held the sphere up to the light. The glass was so old and fogged that the light succeeded only in changing its color from black green to jade green. I pushed my glasses up on my head, inspecting more closely. Cleared my throat—couldn't hide my nervousness—then, after a long pause, I said, "I'm afraid I owe Mr. Tullock an apology. This definitely isn't the object that was stolen from me."

  "You can stick that apology right up your ass." Tullock had taken his seat, legs crossed, foot tapping. "Of course it's mine. You knew all along it was mine. Don't try to play coy now."

  To Lieutenant Suradi, I said, "I'm very sorry. I heard a rumor that he had a similar object—an innocent mistake."

  I crossed to the window, held the glass ball out to Tullock—a deferential gesture. "I admit it. You said it was yours and it is yours. You've proven it. Hope there are no hard feelings."

  Tullock was reaching for the ball, saying, "Lieutenant? I want to press charges. This was a vicious attempt on Mr. Ford's part to create legal problems for me in my new home," as I allowed the ball to roll off my fingers much too soon . . . saw Tullock bat at it, trying to stop the sphere's fall. . . watched the sphere hit the floor and explode into shards of glass and plume of heavy gray dust.

  "You clumsy bastard!" Tullock was on his feet, hands balled into fists. For a moment, I thought he was going to take a swing at me. I would have liked that. He shouted, "You can pay me for this right now. Pay me in cash!" But then he seemed to have a better idea. "Wait—" He t
urned to the two Indonesian policemen. "I want you to charge him with this, too. The intentional destruction of my private . . ." He allowed the sentence to trail off as he noticed that neither Suradi or Prajurit was listening to him. Both were too intent on the mess at Tullock's feet to hear.

  Among the shards of glass was a substantial mound of grayish powder, fine as talcum.

  "What's that?" Tullock asked—the voice of a confused adolescent.

  I had backed against the open chest of drawers when the ball shattered, the bandanna once again in my hands. Now I stepped away from the chest of drawers, shrugged, and said, "I wouldn't know. Like you said, Ray: it's not mine."

  Lieutenant Suradi was on one knee, studying the powder. Sumatra, apparently, was one of the few remaining places in the world where police officers actually touched and tasted unidentified chemicals. I wondered if it tasted offish.

  Maybe it did. Suradi tasted his finger once more, then spat. He looked from Officer Prajurit to Raymond Tullock, then back to Officer Prajurit. Then he spoke in very fast Bahasa Indonesian; long, involved directive sentences that had the ring of discovery.

  Tullock's confusion began to overwhelm him. "What are they saying? What the hell's going on here!"

  Prajurit had a portable radio out and was talking into it. He banged the radio a few times, trying to get it to work. It wouldn't work, so he used the telephone. Suradi stood, felt around for the handcuffs on his belt as he tried to take Tullock by the left wrist. Tullock yanked his wrist away. "Goddamn it, what is that stuff?"

  I watched his face very closely as I said, "I think I heard them say the word 'heroin.' "

  "Heroin?" The expression on his face reminded me of the night he had caught Hannah and me together: bug-eyed crazy . . . wild with rage . . . grotesque. He said, "Do you know how they deal with that? What. . . what the punishment is for that?"

  I wanted to ask, Have you ever seen Simpang Alas Prison? Instead, I gave him a private little wink. Said, "You crossed the borders, Ray. That's always risky."

  What happened next was not pretty. Tullock lunged at me, screaming, "He did this! Search him!" as Suradi tried to get a wrist handcuffed. Suradi interpreted the movement as an attempt to escape. He went to work on Tullock with a wooden baton. Suradi was a tough and determined little man, but Raymond Tullock had a wild tenacity that one associates with the truly insane ... or with those who have absolutely nothing left to lose. When Tullock went down for the fourth time, he lay on the linoleum, alternately cursing me and pleading for my help. We're both Americans, for God's sake.

  I watched his face closely, enjoying it, as I said, "Ray, you're only half right."

  When the backup cops arrived, Suradi did search me. He was no fool and, by now, he was also in a fighting mood. I cooperated fully in what was a very thorough search. In my pockets, he found a clip full of American money. In my zippered leather belt, he found more money. He also found a single passport and tourist card, on which the money had been accurately declared. Aside from a few shiny-bright tarpon scales—he puzzled over those—he found nothing more.

  Later, when Suradi and the others did an equally thorough search of Tullock's room, they would certainly find a second ball of opaque green glass in the chest of drawers . . . where, minutes earlier, I had placed it. . . and what remained of a bag of Burmese heroin—heroin for which a Rangoon bank draft, wired to Norvin Tomlinson, still awaited my final approval.

  But that was Raymond Tullock's problem, not mine.

  Still . . . Lieutenant Suradi didn't like it. Like all cops, he was cynical and suspicious. Coincidence and drug smugglers were two things he did not suffer gladly. Before releasing me, he took my passport—my real passport—along with my tourist card. "When you leave Medan?" he asked.

  I told him truthfully that my plane was due to leave in less than an hour. Pictured Rengat waiting at the airport with my ticket and luggage— luggage full of wood scraps, taped tight—although it was more likely that Rengat had dropped both ticket and luggage at the Garuda counter before taking his family into the mountains for a convenient vacation.

  Suradi shook my passport meaningfully. "You no go to airport tonight. You no go to airport till I say."

  I promised him that I would not go to the airport.

  Outside, on the busy night streets of Medan, the cab I had hired was waiting, my new duffel bags locked in the trunk. I opened the trunk and took out one of my false passports . . . not the passport I had recently had made; not the one that listed my name as Raymond Alan Walley; not the one I had used to clean out Tullock's bank account earlier that afternoon. Could hear Tullock saying, We all look alike to them. Could hear the teller at the Dutch East Indian Bank tell me, "Have nice day, sahr!" as I walked away with a briefcase full of 50,000-denomination rupiah notes—about 1110,000 worth.

  I put the false passport in my pocket, swung into the back seat with the briefcase. Told the driver, "Port of Belawan," as I checked to make sure that I still had the torn halves of the hundred-dollar bills so that I could pay my passage to the captain of the red teak junk out of Rangoon.

  Epilogue

  Here is why I decided, and how I decided, to return to my home at Dinkin's Bay, on Sanibel Island:

  Because I did not trust the betel nut-chewing captain of the Burmese junk, and because I became convinced that he and his crew of Bougie pirates planned to rob me, I jumped ship at the island of Phuket on the Isthmus of Thailand, and spent the next few weeks traveling around Indochina. I needed the time; felt I had rooted myself too deeply in the community that was South Florida, and now was an opportunity to sever those roots. Why had I stayed on Sanibel so long? The accoutrements of a modern life—and the obligations they imply—grow as slowly but as surely as a strangler fig. They also suffocate just as completely.

  One night, at Raffles Hotel in Singapore, I sat outside in the tropical garden and realized, with some surprise, just how completely I had allowed myself to become entwined by the bonds of my island home. I was on committees, I was on boards, I paid electric, water, phone, and insurance. I had become a convenient source of advice and comfort and conversation for the dozens of friends who had come to depend on me almost as much as I had come to depend on them. I had a schedule; I had a routine. I had become one of the regulars, for God's sake. But all human interrelationships exact a price, and for me, that price was the lost look in Hannah's eyes just before she died, and the chill limpness of Tomlinson's hand.

  I wanted to cut free. Revolted at the idea of ever risking it again. Tomlinson believed, he truly believed, in the symmetry of life and in a Creator's universe that was warmed by what he called sentient consciousness. Hannah had possessed the same mystic instincts. She knew. . . .

  But the only thing I knew or believed was that all life—my life included—was a definable, weighable process. That process was brief indeed. For a while at least, I wanted to be free of the tethers. I wanted to be wild and alone and on the loose. So what I did was buy a big-frame backpack and a jungle tent from another one of my Gurkha friends—this was in Kuala Lumpur—and I set off on foot, and by public bus, on my tour of Indochina. What I found was what I expected to find: Asia was on the move. It was chopping, building, and bulldozing its way out of the oxcart world, directly into the world of computer chips. It was financing the transition with the bounty paid—usually by the Japanese—on rain forest timber and increasingly rare sea products. Denotations on maps such as "national park" were euphemisms meaningful only in that they marked regions that bulldozers had not yet reached. The term "net ban" was meaningful only in that it symbolized the increased value of Asia's own unregulated and desperately overused fishery.

  I roamed around, observing, taking notes. Americans who call themselves environmentalists would have found the wholesale destruction I saw shocking. I did not. It was tragic, yes. But not shocking. When stray dogs become a part of the citizenry's menu, professorial speeches about the long-term benefits of virgin forests and sea conservation won't turn
a single head—particularly when those speeches come from people who have never had to stalk their neighborhood's pets.

  I loved the people, but ultimately, I grew tired of Indochina. The people I met were as smart as they were kind; they were as generous as they were tough. The reason I left was trivial: I yearned to hear English spoken. It happens sometimes, when you have been away too long in a foreign land. I had my portable shortwave radio, true. And in places such as Thailand and Cambodia, the V.O.A.—Voice of America—came in fairly strong. But it wasn't enough, so I caught a Qantas flight in Phnom Penh and flew to Darwin.

  Australia and its Northern Territory are the English-speaking world's future . . . just as Asia is currently designing the rest of the world's future. After Cambodia, I was unprepared for the horizon of wild space and pure sea light that rims Darwin. The land has a hot, primeval aspect. Tendrils of steam seep upward, as if the process of chemical genesis still continues. Darwin is an outback town; a frontier town, despite its parks and modern architecture. In too many cities around the world, sidewalk travelers wear expressions of introspective rage. Not in Darwin. In Darwin, people had a blue-collar glow, as if they were just damn glad to live in a world that had electricity and indoor plumbing. Strangers grinned at me on the street, tipped their Akubra cowboy hats and said, "Ga'day!" or, "How ya goin', mate?"

  It was from Darwin that I mailed—via a buddy of mine in Managua— the second of my only two letters to Mack at Dinkin's Bay. The first had included a brief note explaining that I had decided to do some traveling and would be back in about a month. The second letter, sent seven weeks later, explained that I might be gone for six months, maybe more. It included private notes to Janet Mueller, Jeth, and Rhonda and JoAnn aboard the Tiger Lilly. I offered no return address. Still felt the need to be on the loose, untethered.