Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  ‘John.’ They shook hands.

  Michael turned to where the other men were already lifting the crate out of the boot of Harper’s car. It was heavy – they both carried it, two-handed and shuffling, to the boot of the American’s car and placed it inside. Harper waited while the American went round to the rear of the car, gestured for the men to get back in, then bent his head into the boot. There was a crack and a splintering sound as he prised the crate open. He stayed bent into the boot for a few moments, counting, perhaps, moving straw aside? M1 Garands? The Heckler & Koch? Or it could be ammo, more likely with a small delivery – or something specialist, perhaps. After a moment, Michael straightened, lifted his hand to Harper in salute.

  First job done. That was pretty easy. Harper got into the passenger seat of his car.

  ‘Guesthouse now, sir?’ asked his driver, cracking a smile for the first time.

  Harper nodded. ‘Guesthouse now.’

  For the next few months, he acclimatised. He got used to the blanket of heat that lay over the city at all times of the day and night, the way the closeness of the air made him feel a little nauseous first thing in the morning. He toured the city on a moped, weaving in and out of the traffic on the wide superhighways that carved their way through the shanty towns like a lawnmower scything grass: the Great Leader Soekarno was on a massive building programme, to prove to the world that Jakarta was a modern city, the Paris of the East. He wrote reports for Johnson and Amsterdam on the grip the PKI was exerting in certain districts: anti-Western graffiti was everywhere: KILL CAPITALIST SKUM. He befriended Benni the gangster – and saw his first but not last incident of a man being tortured.

  As the antagonism towards foreigners in Jakarta grew, more and more of them left the city, particularly the Americans and the Brits, and he began to understand why Gregor had chosen him. He bought his clothes at a store next to the guesthouse and let his hair grow for a bit then went to a barber on Jalan Gondangdia who cut it like the local men’s – he had arrived with it too short and neat around his ears, he realised. He worked on his language skills and his mannerisms. When he wasn’t hanging out with Benni’s gang, he took to wandering the streets in a white shirt and sarong. Sometimes, he would spend time squatting by the road alongside other men with mopeds but nothing to do because petrol was so scarce. He joined a couple of demonstrations where he wore a red bandana and shouted slogans but his instructions were clear: observe, join in a bit but don’t get actively involved. Only once did he overstep the mark, caught up in the excitement of one march, when he observed an Australian television crew filming the gang he was with. As they passed, he shook his fist at them and shouted, ‘Lackeys of the British!’ and the young men either side of him took up the shout. The film crew followed them for a few minutes, until two of the young men in Harper’s group detached themselves and went up to the Australians and started shoving them backwards. Harper kept going but glanced back: it was frustrating, always being on the fringe of the action.

  At other times, he dressed in his beige slacks and a shirt, combed his hair with pomade and pressed a panama on top and went hanging out in the bars frequented by the foreign press. Once, he even encountered a man he was sure had been amongst the Australian television crew – but with Harper in Western clothes and speaking immaculate English, there was no flicker of recognition from the Australian, to whom all Indonesian protestors no doubt looked the same. The man was called Gibson and they got drunk together on Tjap Tikus, high-end arak, round a small table in a side-street bar off Jalan Thamrin.

  ‘Soekarno’s started eating his own,’ Gibson confided. ‘You know lots of the ministers have taken to sleeping away from their homes at night? The Father of the Nation’s getting careless. When you start making your own people that nervous, you know . . .’ He made a short stabbing notion at Harper’s ribs.

  Later, after Harper had moved on to fruit juice but Gibson had stayed on the arak, the Australian became loquacious. ‘Indonesia isn’t a nation, it’s an imagination,’ he said, then looked around, pleased with himself. ‘S’karno made it up! Made it up, the speeches, and, take it from me, when they push’m out, the whole lot will just evaporate . . . like a dream . . .’ At this, Gibson splayed his fingers and moved his hand in a semi-circular motion in front of Harper’s face. ‘S’all going to fall apart. Easy to sneer at him, in his hat, with his girlfriends, but you look at what will happen if he goes. Jus’ wait. Holds it all together.’ He clenched his fist.

  Harper made a note of the man’s sympathies – perhaps the Americans should look into him – and could not resist adding, ‘Well, maybe we should wait and see what happens if this region becomes the next Communist bloc. I wonder what the Indonesian for gulag is.’

  The bar was dark, the fan above them inefficient, the crowd large even though a lot of Westerners had left: there were so few places in the city where Westerners felt comfortable any more, they had a tendency to congregate. Gibson withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. ‘God knows why they call it the Cold War, it’s fucking hot in Jakarta.’ And Harper rewarded him with a clap on the shoulder and a convincing laugh.

  Then came the abrupt command from Johnson: forget the gangsters. Four months of careful, nauseating and sometimes dangerous sucking up to Benni and it was all down the drain.

  ‘Why?’ Harper asked. He and Johnson were in the same bar where he had drunk Gibson beneath a table, but this time it was daytime and they were sipping green tea. The curfew had made nighttime excursions increasingly difficult, the journalists all stuck to the hotel bar now, and the power shortages meant many places closed at night anyway. The Merdeka Day celebrations had been and gone and Soekarno had declared a new stage in the revolution, which for most people meant that the rice shortages had reached epidemic proportions. No one was paid in rupiah any more, there was no point: people were demanding to be paid in rice and there wasn’t enough rice to pay them. Some were simply marching into stores in mobs and helping themselves.

  They were sitting at the front, by the windows, where the shutters were pulled back and Johnson’s car was parked on the kerb. Harper had noticed that Johnson never went anywhere on foot any more – he was always in a car with a couple of minders in it. The People’s Youth had taken to beating up foreigners.

  Johnson was in his usual taciturn mood, sipping carefully at his tea, glancing out of the window from time to time. ‘Things are moving fast,’ he said. ‘We need to speed things up a bit.’

  Johnson insisted that Harper move into Hotel Indonesia, which was full of foreign journalists like Gibson and the businessmen who were prepared to overlook the rising political tensions while Jakarta was an opportunity: Soekarno was still building freeways, after all. ‘We can’t guarantee your safety if you stay in that guesthouse,’ Johnson told Harper and Harper wanted to reply, when have you ever guaranteed my safety? Johnson would stay concerned for his well-being right up until the point when he was compromised in any way, upon which he would deny that he or any other American official had ever met or known him. Surely the visibility of being in a place like Hotel Indonesia, full of foreigners, constantly spied upon, had its own dangers?

  And so, he changed identity again. He folded his sarong neatly and put it away and checked into the hotel wearing slacks and his panama, carrying a newspaper, walking with his shoulders thrown back.

  ‘Welcome to Hotel Indonesia, sir,’ said the doorman, with a deep bow.

  He acknowledged the courtesy by touching his newspaper to the side of his forehead and toyed with the idea of saying, ‘Ciao.’ Maybe he should learn some Italian. He’d passed for Italian before now. He knew Jews, Arabs and Asians who had pretended to be Italian. Everyone liked Italians – the food was great, the women beautiful, and they were hopeless at invading other countries.

  He disliked being in a smart hotel, which almost certainly had eavesdroppers on the end of the telephone lines and apparatchiks of the government security services amongst the staff. Okay, s
o the air conditioning and comfortable bed were good but from a professional point of view, he felt too exposed to do his job. He couldn’t operate underground now – there could be no more strolling the streets in a sarong. He began to wonder if Johnson had parked him here in such a stupidly expensive place because he had decided he didn’t really have any use for him. Not for the first time, he wondered how much operations like this cost, and how the American taxpayers who funded CIA guys like Johnson would feel about it if they knew.

  Then came the night Harper went down to the lobby and found that the doorman standing on the inside did not, for once, open the door wide onto the hotel driveway with a smile and a deep bow. He stood still and straight, with his arms folded and a serious expression on his face.

  The assistant general manager was standing next to him with a smile. He stepped forward as Harper approached and said, ‘Good evening, sir, perhaps you would like to avail yourself of the dining room or the club lounge this evening?’ He indicated across the lobby with his arm wide.

  ‘Is there anything wrong?’ Harper asked, looking out onto the driveway, where sleek cars were still pulling in and disgorging smiling passengers for the nightclub on the top floor. The streets looked normal to him.

  ‘No, not at all,’ the assistant general manager replied quickly, still smiling. ‘Shall we obtain you a taxi?’

  It was nothing he could put his finger on, just a feeling. ‘No, thank you,’ he said.

  Back in his room, he rotated the dial on the bedside radio receiver but only got the hotel’s piped music or a blur of white noise. The white noise was odd. Soekarno’s speeches were usually broadcast more or less continuously and there had been one at Senayan Stadium earlier that evening. He turned the radio off and went to the window. The huge round pond that filled the centre of the roundabout outside the hotel was in darkness, the floodlights dimmed. A few lone cars were circling it. It was as if the city was holding its breath.

  In the morning, he woke to the same sensation. He went and looked out of the window. The roundabout was quiet. Normally, by this time, you would hear the stirrings of hotel staff outside in the corridor; was he imagining it or was the corridor quiet as well? After months of almost daily demonstrations, there seemed a strange absence – that crackle in the air, was it gone? Perhaps he was just tired of waiting. Nothing was more exhausting than doing nothing, after all.

  The only place to find out more was the bar.

  The journalists were all drinking and eating bowls of nuts for breakfast. That was when he knew. Those who monitored Radio Republik Indonesia had heard the announcement of the Communist takeover when they rose. Most of the hacks were there, apart from those who were still asleep: there was a rumour that a New Zealand correspondent known for his lunatic risk-taking in pursuit of a story had set off for Merdeka Square, where soldiers were already setting up roadblocks around the presidential palace.

  He ordered a drink himself and sat on a bar stool next to a group of Australians. ‘This is it boys, I tell you,’ one was saying, ‘the Commies are taking power and we might as well get drunk because it’s bullets in the back of the head before sunset.’

  ‘Let’s wait and see,’ drawled one of the others, while lifting his glass.

  There was a note of hysteria amongst the hacks, Harper thought – a hysteria he did not share. After a while, he went upstairs and smoked ferociously while waiting for the phone to ring with his instructions. It didn’t.

  Within three days, the same journalists from that morning were in the bar celebrating. The Communist takeover had been defeated. The military were back in power. Two days later, the Generals who had been killed by the Communists during the attempted coup, or putsch, or whatever it was, were being buried with all due pomp and ceremony at Kalibata Heroes Cemetery.

  Still no word from Johnson.

  That afternoon, he decided to see if he could get an international line: they had been closed for some days but it was worth trying intermittently. More than once, one of the hacks had wandered into the bar crowing about his success in getting through and started an exit stampede, only for everyone to return disconsolate because the connections were down again.

  Harper tried the phone in the lobby rather than the one in his room, although it was probably also bugged. There would be a low-ceilinged basement somewhere beneath the hotel, rows of desks staffed by young men with neatly combed hair and headphones pressed to one ear and a pencil in the other hand. However often the regime changed, the same staff would be there, still taking notes. The junior apparatus of government always stayed the same, at least for a while: the notes might be delivered to a different boss, that was all. Small cogs still turned even though the big wheel above them was slowing, halting, then – without ever being entirely motionless it seemed – beginning to grind in a different direction.

  ‘Sit tight,’ said the operative who manned the Institute’s phone – this was long before the days of the twenty-four-hour hotline and computerised information: the operative back home would be sitting at a desk with a list of handwritten instructions to pass on if Harper called in. ‘When the situation has stabilised, we will want your analysis of how the economy will recover.’

  ‘I would welcome the chance to gather more information on that as soon as I can,’ Harper replied.

  A few days later, Harper went for a walk around the side streets, just for a few minutes, to taste the air. It was a relief to be out, even briefly, away from the claustrophobic world of the hotel. As he rounded a corner on the way back, he saw a group of young men ripping down a set of handwritten posters from a wall. As they did, he glimpsed a Communist slogan. The young men were tearing the posters into shreds and jumping on them.

  What surprised him was not that the young men were ripping down the posters but that the posters had been put up at all – a pointless act of provocation on the part of the PKI, he thought, if anti-Communist feeling was now at boiling point. It didn’t make sense.

  Daily, the radio broadcast detailed reports of the terrible things the Communist traitors had done before the brave, loyal army had succeeded in restoring order and saving the nation. After the heroic Generals had been abducted on that night, the wicked Gerwani women had cut off their testicles and danced naked in front of them, to torment them. Women Communists were even worse than the men, it would appear.

  Death to the Communist traitors, the newscasters urged.

  *

  The following week, Johnson finally made contact. They met in a street behind the hotel, walking towards each other for a long time along an uneven sidewalk with the road on one side and a high, fissured wall made of concrete on the other. The wall was defaced with graffiti and torn posters, litter gathered around the base of the palm trees that lined the road and there was an unnatural silence in the cloudy air. Johnson nodded to him as he approached, casually, as if they had seen each other only the day before. As they drew near, they both stopped, facing each other. They folded their arms.

  ‘Pak Parno,’ Johnson said, looking from side to side as they talked.

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘You don’t need to know. He’s well connected, that’s all you need to know. Here’s the address.’ He handed Harper a small, folded piece of paper.

  Harper opened it: Pejompongan, a street called Jalan Danau Maninjau, not far from the Naval Hospital. Harper knew the area a little, a mosque, a Catholic church, middle-class bungalows: a lot of civil servants lived round there. A naval attaché of some sort, perhaps? The navy had been heavily infiltrated by the Communists, though, and this man was presumably on the side of the military so maybe an army or air force connection more likely?

  ‘Go and see him this afternoon, visiting hour, get a feel for him and let him get a feel for you. If it goes okay, you’ll deliver a list of names to a general who will be at his house some time next week.’

  ‘What’s the point of this visit?’

  ‘Nothing, it’s a social call, oil the wheels, you kno
w how people here are. Buddy up to him a bit. Act like you’re honoured to meet him.’

  The street was empty. It seemed to be making Johnson nervous. On the other side of the road, there was a parked car with his minders in it, but he glanced around as he talked. Then he looked at his watch, said, ‘Be there five pm,’ and turned away.

  Later that day, Harper got a betjak from outside the hotel. He leaned forward with his forearms resting on the bar in front of him as the driver began to pedal.

  ‘Pejompongan long place, sir,’ the driver said over his shoulder. He was an older man, wrinkled face, thinning hair, still out plying his trade, despite what was going on – if you didn’t ply your trade, you didn’t eat. Most of the betjak drivers were young men but this one had an air of being both aged and ageless.

  ‘Just head that way, I’ll tell you where to stop,’ Harper said. He never told the betjak driver the exact address.

  It was the densest, hottest part of the day; the air close, the sky hazy. The betjak driver had large bony knees that seemed disproportionate to his skinny legs: as he pedalled, they rose up and down alternately, like shiny balls in an arcade. Harper felt exhausted just sitting there. That man must be three times my age and half my weight, he thought, but look at him. Darkness wouldn’t fall for hours, yet it already felt as if the buildings and the ground were exhaling the heat they had been absorbing all day. Even the swift pedalling of the driver couldn’t rustle up a breeze.

  With the streets still quiet, the journey was a lot quicker than he had anticipated. He got the driver to drop him by the river and decided to take a look around, get a feel for the area. The water was high, the colour of milky coffee; a few pieces of refuse floated in it. The monsoon season was upon them and the rain was getting heavier every day now. This river would flood soon, as most of the rivers in Jakarta did, the colonial drainage systems having long fallen into disrepair.