The Mark of the Spider: A Black Orchid Chronicle

by David L. Haase

  I performed some rough calculations in my head.

  “A whole tree must be a fortune in the Malay economy,” I said.

  “Sure. Sure. One big piece this round”—he stretched his arms into a circle with his fingertips barely touching—“all men who cut tree live whole year. Live very, very good.”

  “So, they were after the timber?” I asked.

  “Maybe so. Maybe orchids. I don’t know. I don’t know these men.”

  “Why did they let me go?”

  “Foreigner. Foreigner goes away, dies, police come. No cut trees. Lose money. Better they scare, you stay away. Everything OK.”

  I left it at that. I was alive. A little smoked, very much stung, but still alive. And I would soon be shooting Bornean orchids again.

  I pushed my empty beer bottle toward the bartender. He dug into the cooler, pulled out a fresh one, popped it open and shoved it my direction.

  My Borneo—up-country, in the jungle-covered far corners of Sabah Park—offered plenty of challenges. Some might even consider them dangers. Snakes, bugs and germs of all kinds, leeches, poisonous plants and more than a few desperate people who poached timber, flowers and minerals. The sheikh paid me excessively well to put up with all that as well as the constant heat, humidity and lousy working conditions.

  But I had to calculate the relative risk of each. If these poachers knew Firash, maybe I was okay. After all, I didn’t pose much threat to them: I hadn’t seen their faces, and I wouldn’t likely recognize their voices. If they got paranoid, however, or harbored a grievance, they could easily find me.

  Here in Tenom, a collection of 5,000 souls deep inside the Malaysian province of Sabah in northern Borneo, Western visitors rarely spent the night. Tourists who rode the train up from Kota Kinabalu spent a few hours in the park, then caught the afternoon train back down to the coast. So, if the poachers came looking for me…

  “Hot enough for you, mate?”

  The Crocodile Dundee accent roused me.

  “Huh?”

  “Mind if I sit,” he said, lifting a cheek onto the wooden barstool next to mine.

  The newcomer was tall, a bit above my six-feet, disgustingly fit-looking for a guy in his mid to late 30s, and actually tanned, not sunburned like most of the Westerners who stumbled into the Brunei Bar now and again. He wore pressed khakis and polished boots.

  “Take a load off,” I said, looking around. Every other seat at the bar was vacant, as were most of the tables.

  What with the hornet stings, the heat, the temporary loss of my camera equipment and their precious photos and my own self-imposed isolation, I felt massively indifferent to the whole world, much less this pretty Australian desk jockey.

  “John Walker,” the newcomer said, offering his hand. “Australian economic attaché in Kota Kinabalu. My friends call me Johnnie.”

  “Johnnie Walker. Like the whisky?” I asked, keeping my sweaty, wasp-stung hand on the bar.

  “My father had a sense of humor,” he said. “Buy you a beer?”

  “Only if it’s colder than this one.” I nodded at my half-filled bottle, iced moments earlier but weeping the last beads of condensation now.

  Johnnie Walked hallooed the sleepy bartender holding up a distant wall.

  The Brunei Bar filled ninety percent of the ground floor of the Sarawak Hotel, my temporary home in the little town of Tenom. In the hotel rooms above the bar, window air conditioners battled tropical heat and humidity to a draw, as long as the electricity stayed on. The bar, however, lacked air conditioning. Sluggish ceiling fans jostled the muggy air. The place did offer frosty Chinese Snow beer, but the beer didn’t stay cold very long. I was on my fourth nightcap and was probably good for another two or three before the heat drove me upstairs to a tepid shower and my roaring air conditioner.

  “Got a name?” The Australian turned his attention back to me.

  “Sebastian Arnett,” I said, coming out of my reverie. “Nature photographer.”

  “I heard about your accident with the bees.”

  I frowned.

  “Really?”

  The bartender set two bottles of Snow in front of us as I eyed Mr. Walker.

  “Not much else going on here, so I guess the Westerner with the bee stings leads the news.”

  That was interesting, but I let it pass.

  “So, what is the economic attaché to a remote Malaysian province doing here in Tenom?” I asked. Experience from my Peace Corps days in northern Thailand had taught me that overly friendly strangers in remote parts of Asia were most likely spies or hookers. This guy wasn’t the latter so I pegged him for a spy, but I decided to play along. After all, when the sun goes down, there’s really not that much to do in Tenom, and I had been doing it for months.

  “Is there that much economic activity going on in northern Borneo that Australia requires an attaché here?” I asked.

  “You’d be surprised,” Walker said. “It’s not the primitive backwater it used to be.”

  “Oh, really,” I said, looking down on the wasp stings on my arms.

  “All right, you seem to have found one of the more primitive areas, but there’s been plenty of development over the last decade or more. It’s the timber and minerals—or promise of minerals that has everyone’s attention.”

  “Everyone?”

  “You know. Indonesians. They own more than half the island. Malaysians, our hosts, they own most of the rest. The Sultan of Brunei, who owns the smallest bit of the island, is trying to diversify out of oil and gas. Some Indians. Some Vietnamese, Japanese, Filipinos.”

  “Ah, but the 800-pound gorilla in the room that interests you is…?”

  “Well, China’s a big country with big needs,” Walker said.

  I looked at all the empty bar stools on either side of us.

  “What makes you seek out a humble photographer of flowers?”

  “What makes you think I’m seeking you out?”

  I swiveled on the barstool, taking in the emptiness of our surroundings.“You’re right,” I said. “The place is packed.”

  “Point taken,” he said. “I heard about you in Kota. The American consul says you’re pretty connected, what with your letters of introduction and all.”

  “My letters of introduction? What do you know about them?”

  “Please. Kota’s a small place, too, with very few Anglos. Everybody in our community knows everybody else’s business. You’re here doing a job for one of the wealthiest men in the world. That makes you special.”

  “The American consul told you that?”

  “Small community,” he said, shrugging.

  “Well, then, what do you think I can do for you, Mr. Walker?”

  He gave me a look, as though he was deciding his next move. I sipped the last of the already lukewarm beer. Was it the fifth or sixth? Johnnie Walker had made me lose count.

  I slid one leg off the barstool.

  Walker put his hand over my arm, barely touching it.

  “One more for the road. I do have a proposition that might interest you. It won’t cost you anything to listen.”

  I stared at his hand. He lifted it. I eased back onto the stool. He caught the bartender’s eye and held up two fingers.

  “All right,” I said.

  “You’ve got to be bored by now. You never take a vacation. You shoot photographs from dawn until it rains, seven days a week. When the sun goes down, you sit here and drink alone. You don’t avail yourself of the ladies. So how about taking a break?”

  My routine was no secret, but I didn’t like that he knew it so well.

  “A break? What kind of break?”

  “I was thinking of a trip inland.”

  “Farther inland than Tenom?”

  “Come on, mate. This isn’t exactly off the beaten track. The lovely tourists in Kota can take the train up here in three hours, have a look at your orchids, eat dinner, and be back in Kota’s air-conditioned splendor by nightfall. I’m talking far inlan
d.”

  “Did you have a place in mind?”

  “A couple of spots on the map look interesting, but if you have someplace you’d rather go, fine.”

  I sipped from the icy bottle the bartender set in front of me.

  “Hmm.”

  I took another sip. No doubt about it. My nightly buzz was setting in, loosening my tongue and turning me all sociable.

  “I’ll tell you, Mr. Walker. I’m hearing little warning bells in my ears. You want to go just anywhere inland with me? You wouldn’t be what we civilians call a spy, would you?”

  “A spy? Not hardly. ‘Spy’ connotes derring-do and all that. I think they call those types ‘special operatives’ nowadays. Whereas I pretty much sit around an office all day reading dull economic studies,” Walker said.

  “But tonight, all of a sudden, you’re here in Tenom, buying me beer and wanting to be weekend buddies,” I said.

  He had to be a spy. And the damned American consulate in Kota Kinabalu had obviously blabbed about my job for the sheikh. I hadn’t liked the officious consul, a Mr. Floyd, when I first met him on my way up here. He asked more questions than he needed to. He was probably a spy, too. Asia was crawling with the human roaches.

  I wondered if I was the only Anglo on Borneo not messing around in other people’s business. The sheikh’s instructions were straightforward: Photograph “the most beautiful, the most delightful, the most interesting” orchids I could find on an island with more than 3,000 species. Even racing through them as I was, I’d need to spend at least six more months in this sauna to finish the job.

  The sheikh left all the artistic decisions to me. He liked my work. Years ago, my shot of Vanda coerulea, the Blue Orchid, won first prize in an international photo competition. One of the sheikh’s finders brought it to his attention. I happily sold him the rights, and he hung a copy in all eight of the luxury resorts he owned worldwide.

  That one sale allowed me to give up trying to teach English to surly American teen-agers and become a professional photographer. I made a fairly decent living, at least until cancer assaulted my wife.

  Sarah. We’d met in Thailand; I dug wells, and she taught English. After our tours were over, we returned to the States to start a family. I piggy-backed on her teaching genius. Our family never materialized, so we spent summer vacations traveling the world, she soaking up people and I shooting photographs.

  Then came the leukemia. We tried every treatment. Used up our savings, sold the house, even some of my camera gear before she finally died, a skeletal reminder of her former self. Four years on, I still missed her, still drank myself to sleep each night, still burned off the alcohol taking photos.

  “Hey, you still with me, mate?”

  “What?”

  “Your head went someplace and left me drinking by myself,” Walker said.

  “Heat does that. Puts me to sleep with my eyes wide open.”

  “So, what do you think? Try one trip. Your cameras won’t be ready for another few days. You can look for flowers, and I can look for rocks. If we get on, we can do it again.”

  It seemed so insidiously simple.

  “What you really mean is that a photographer on a credible mission would give you excellent cover for whatever it is you plan to do. You can’t actually sniff out economic activity by examining rocks you find lying on the ground, can you?” I asked.

  “Not really, but I would be looking at the logistics of removing the rock and checking out local customs, clan alliances, feuds—whatever would affect extraction and transportation. Pretty benign stuff really.”

  I raised one eyebrow.

  “And, of course, any signs of our Chinese friends making inroads,” he said.

  “What would I get out of this, aside from the pleasure of your company?”

  “I hear tell your employer is offering quite a bounty for a particular flower. You’re not likely to find it in the park. If it were here, you or Firash Taufik or his poacher relatives would have found it by now.”

  So, this is what being stalked feels like, I thought. Even the American consul, Mr. Lyle Freakin’ Floyd, shouldn’t have known the sheikh had offered me one million dollars for evidence that the black orchid exists. A single photograph of a single bloom is all it would take. Like most orchid observers, I think the black orchid is a myth, but I admit I had my eye out for it.

  “You know an awful lot about my business,” I said.

  “I’m not in the habit of broadcasting what I know. I’m just pointing out that both of us could benefit. C’mon, you’ve got a sense of adventure—you’d have to, doing what you do. Here’s a chance to see new things, on my tab. I’ll pick up all the expenses. And we can drink cold beer together every night.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “No down side for me, just hanging out with a foreign spy. The Malaysians would love that. You’ve got diplomatic immunity. I don’t. And I’ll be damned if I embarrass my employer by getting arrested for spying.”

  “We’re not going to do anything illegal. My government frowns on that. Borneo is a close neighbor. We don’t like to antagonize.”

  “Let’s say I’m willing to try this. Who picks the itinerary?”

  “As I said, mate, you pick one weekend, and I pick the next. Can’t get more fair than that.”

  “You arrange transportation, but I pay my own way.”

  “If you insist.”

  I did insist.

  “In addition,” I said, downing the last of my beer, “I sign nothing and I take no pay, no gifts.”

  “Not even the temporary loan of a camera and a new lens while your gear is being cleaned? If the outfit felt comfortable, you could keep it. A token of friendship,” Walker said.

  I’d sold my most expensive lenses in the past to pay medical bills, but I wasn’t about to take a gift from somebody I thought worked for an intelligence agency. Once those types do you a favor, they own you.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I especially would not accept a new wide-angle lens, suitable for taking panoramic landscapes of potential mining sites.”

  He grinned.

  “Can’t blame a bloke for trying,” he said.

  Maybe Johnnie Walker would be a welcome distraction. I was bored. With Sarah gone, I had nothing to lose. And, I chuckled to myself, I might find the mythical black orchid and make myself a millionaire sooner. God knows, the sheikh was pushing me in that direction with his daily rate and expenses.

  “All right,” I said. “Just one thing. I’ll let the U.S. consulate and the Malay police in Kota Kinabalu know of our arrangement.”

  “Excellent! I’m sure Mr. Floyd will be pleased for both of us.”

  “Will you be sharing your findings with him?” I asked.

  “Why not? It’s all above board.” He drained his bottle. “It’s great to meet a Westerner out here who isn’t afraid of the heat, the bugs and snakes and leeches. Not to mention the headhunters.”

  We agreed to meet early the next day. He waved and sauntered out of the bar, leaving me alone again to wonder.

  What was that wisecrack about headhunters?

  Chapter 3

  False Start

  The sun peeked over the treetops as our Pilatus Porter bush plane zoomed down a dirt road on the edge of Tenom. As soon as the front wheel lifted off the ground, the roaring engine lifted us straight into the sky.

  I sat on the floor, behind the passenger seat, squashed between the metal skin of the aircraft and the musculature of a 300-pound Samoan named Kerisiano Gaugakao Mata’ala. I called him Sammy. The g-force pushed us back against hundreds of pounds of gear Johnnie and his two assistants had jammed into the aging plane.

  Sammy grinned at me like he was having the time of his life. I grinned back, uncomfortably. We sat cross-legged to save room, with backpacks on our laps serving as seat belts.

  Johnnie rode shotgun with a pack on his lap, and his waif-like Malaysian sidekick, Kechik “Chik” Budiharto, aimed the Porter’s long nose toward the sun
with the joy of a teenager at the wheel.

  The Porter’s spinning propeller cleared the trees by inches, but I’d swear our tail dusted the top leaves. Chik turned back to me with a happy motorcyclist’s open-mouthed smile. I shrugged back.

  Johnnie promised to take care of all the arrangements of our travel, but I should have asked for details. I expected a Land Rover, beat up and windowless to be sure, but ground transportation. Tenom had two paved roads out of town, one to the north, the other to the southwest. The former eventually reaches the Pacific Ocean at Kota; the latter peters out to jungle about 30 kilometers distant, at least on the maps I consulted. I assumed we would be heading south toward the more remote interior.

  With an airplane, even a piece of junk like the Porter, Johnnie clearly planned to cover some serious territory.

  He, Chik and Sammy arrived prepared for anything. I accepted Johnnie’s loan of a Nikon D4 with a 35 mm wide-angle lens and added it to the spare shirt and socks in my back pack. Add a water bottle and some energy bars, and that was all I needed for a weekend outing.

  And one other thing: A World War I-era .455 caliber Webley Mark VI with a six-inch barrel, the same weapon Lawrence of Arabia used. It was a heavy, ugly brute that hinged open behind the trigger for loading its six cylinders. I got it from a gun nut in West Virginia who traded it for some boudoir photographs of his not-very-attractive wife. (It’s amazing what a really big shadow in the right place can do.) He assured me it could blow anything to hell in small pieces. I test-fired it exactly once and believed him.

  Johnnie and company carried Browning 9mm Mark IIIs, the standard sidearm of the Australian military. Those guns, and their mutton MREs, made me wonder about their official status.

  We all wore a fixed-blade knife. Johnnie was right: Borneo was hardly the primitive backwater of 100 years ago. But the modern world of air-conditioning, Wi-Fi, and CNN International hugged the coastline. Inland, where the timber and minerals lay, wildcat logging and extralegal extraction—as well as orchid poaching—thrived. As in the Wild West, strangers were suspect. I figured we were ready for anything Borneo could throw at us.

  As Chik throttled back the engine to a dull roar and leveled off above the trees, I started to relax as much as my crossed legs would allow. After a booze-assisted night of sleep, I concluded Johnnie had been pulling my leg about the headhunters. Funny bastard. I planned to introduce him to one of the nastier looking, but totally harmless, snakes that had made me wet myself the first time I stepped on one.