Prophets and Loss (A Johnny Ravine Mystery)

by Martin Roth

  Chapter Eight

  More customers arrived: some students, and a family group that included a barrel-bellied Asian man with moustache and white bow tie who looked as if he had stepped from an Indiana Jones movie. I waited until the waitress had walked past to serve them. Then I looked Rohan in the eye.

  “Do you know what you’re thinking when you’re strapped to a wooden table in a Dili army cell receiving electric shock torture?”

  “Well, you must be hoping the East Timor Power Corporation doesn’t experience a power surge just at that time.” He bowed his head in mock shame. “Oops. Sorry. Shouldn’t’ve said that.”

  “They use a machine with a handle,” I said. “A generator. They attach wires to your thumbs, and a soldier revs it up and down. They make their own surges. No, what you’re thinking about is water. You keep wishing they’d throw a bucket of water over you.”

  “Yeah. Right. That makes sense to me. A bucketful of water when you’ve got a trillion volts being pumped into you.”

  “That’s what I mean. You lose your ability to think straight. The pain sends you crazy. You’re shaking. You’ve got spots in front of your eyes. You feel hot and dry. Like you’re on fire. So you want water.”

  Rohan was silent for a while. “Not nice,” he said simply.

  “Even when it’s done you’re still in shock. Parts of you are in pain. Other parts are numb. You lose your sense of taste. You want to drink liter after liter of water. You can’t sleep. You think you’re going mad. And you know that the next day it’ll probably all start again.”

  “No, not for me I’m afraid,” murmured Rohan. “I’m a coward. I’d be hopeless as a foreign correspondent. I even sometimes wonder what I’m doing as an investigative reporter. I’m more the lifestyle type. All those soldiers - what are they drinking nowadays at the Dili bars and bistros? What’s the latest in the East Timor disco scene?”

  Was this levity a way of avoiding reality? Yet I guessed Rohan had to be tough to be so dogged in his pursuit of the Dili Tigers story.

  “It went on for three weeks,” I continued. “Not every day, of course. But near enough. With some beatings thrown in now and again.”

  “What did they want?”

  “All the details of our operations. Names. Positions. Plans. And they wanted to punish me. I’d killed a lot of their soldiers.”

  “A bit of gratuitous torture. Why didn’t they just kill you right off?”

  “They always intended to kill me. I was pretty sure of that. That’s why I didn’t tell them anything. Nothing important. So they kept torturing me, but they also made sure they kept me alive.”

  “And you’re still with us.”

  “I escaped.”

  Rohan paused again. “I’ll come back to that. But how did you become a...not a terrorist, were you? A guerrilla? No, that doesn’t sound right. A freedom fighter. That’s it. Got to be careful with words these days. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up. How did you become a freedom fighter in the first place?”

  “I discovered the Bible.”

  Rohan was silent, perhaps unable to think of a witty rejoinder. “Go on,” he said at last.

  “My mother was a rebel.”

  “A rebel mother? Sounds exciting.”

  “I don’t mean against the government. She was a rebel against everything. A gorgeous rebel. People told me she was the most beautiful girl on the island. A mestizo. Part Indonesian, part Portuguese, a touch of Indian and Chinese. When she was about fifteen she somehow had an Australian boyfriend. I guess she must have spoken some English. Or he spoke her language. There can’t have been too many Australians in Dili four-and-a-half decades years ago. Anyway, she went and got pregnant.”

  “Pregnant with you.”

  “With me. Unmarried and pregnant was bad enough, but with a foreign boyfriend who apparently disappeared soon after. She got herself kicked out of the family. What could she do? She went and sold her body. To survive.”

  Rohan pursed his lips.

  “She went to live in a suburb called Colmera, out by the Portuguese barracks. It was notorious. Bars everywhere, cheap beer, palm wine, Japanese radio cassette players with the latest Brazilian love songs, teenage boys riding up and down on their motor scooters. And lots of available women. So I was raised most of the time by some elderly American missionaries. Actually they were officially in Dili as coffee traders, because the Portuguese wouldn’t have let them in as missionaries. But really they were trying to evangelize. My main language became English. Southern Baptist English.”

  “Lawdy, lawdy.”

  “Something like that. My mother would bring me presents. When a ship was in port she’d get jeans and Hawaiian shirts from the Japanese and the Filipino sailors. I was the best-dressed kid in town. And sometimes when she’d saved some money she’d try to start a new life with me. The missionaries would try to help her. But the only living she really knew was prostitution, and she kept returning to that.”

  “Poor Mum, bringing up a kid unsupported in a dirt poor country,” said Rohan with a flash of kindness.

  “Most of the time it was the missionaries who raised me. They brought me up as a Christian.”

  “You turned from your mother to your Father. In Heaven. What about your real father, if that’s not out of line?”

  “As I said, he was an Australian. But I never knew him. He’d disappeared soon after I was born.”

  Rohan refilled our plastic cups with hot tea from the thermos flask. “Tell me about the Bible.”

  “The missionaries gave me one.”

  “They tend to do that, don’t they? Missionaries.”

  “I read it and fell in love. With a guy named Jesus. Heard of Him?”

  Rohan eyed me. “Yeah. Reckon I have.”

  “I fell in love. But not with the meek and mild little lamb Jesus. But with Jesus the revolutionary. The guy who smashed the moneylenders’ tables and helped the poor. I wanted to be just like Him. I wanted what He wanted. I wanted justice.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Have you read the Bible?”

  “Only every day at Geelong Grammar.”

  I watched as a balding middle-aged Western man accompanied by a fat Asian lady took a table near ours. “He changed the world,” I continued. “I decided I was going to change East Timor. In 1975 the Indonesians invaded our country. My mother was one of the many victims. Killed by a lustful gang of young Indonesian soldiers apparently. I went and joined the freedom movement. I was fourteen.”

  “How long were you with them?”

  “More than twenty years.”

  “A career freedom fighter. And then you were captured.”

  “In a way.”

  “‘In a way.’ Sounds like you have another story.”

  “I’d got married. To Jacinta.”

  “You were married? Well I never.”

  “Twenty-or-more years in the mountains is a long time. Seeing most of your friends killed. Knowing it could happen to you at any time. Starting to have doubts about whether your cause really is going to be successful. Then this wonderful girl joined our group. Arrived out of nowhere.”

  “Out of nowhere?”

  “Well, not quite. Her family had owned a coffee plantation, but it got seized by the Indonesian authorities, and they were all relocated to Java. She smuggled herself back into Timor and found our group. Said she wanted to be a fighter.”

  “And you fell in love.”

  “We fell in love. Got married. A secret wedding up in the hills with a friendly priest and a few men with guns. And my life changed. I started thinking about settling down. Having a family. I sent her back to stay with friends near Dili. I didn’t want her hurt, and she was a pretty useless soldier anyway. She was idealistic, but she couldn’t use a gun. I’d secretly come and visit her sometimes. She was staying on a small farm. We used to feed the chickens and the pigs together. We talked about trying to get our own small farm. But then...” I paused. The pain was still rea
l.

  Rohan busied himself with trying to find a little more tea in his empty cup.

  “The army got her,” I said at last.

  “Jacinta?”

  “Somehow they found out that I’d gotten married. And they knew where she was. They got her and let it be known that they were going to torture her. I had to try and rescue her.”

  “Da dum, da dum, the East Timor cavalry to the rescue. Sound the bugles.”

  “No cavalry. Just me. And I failed. They got me. Put me on the torture rack and brought in the butchers. They wanted to know all about our operations. Their leader was a brutal guy by the name of Alberto. He was a leader of the Dili Tigers. He did all the officers’ dirty work. Torture, murder, destruction of homes. The army brought a lot like him to Dili. We got some of them. But we could never get Alberto. You know the reason?”

  Rohan shrugged his shoulders.

  “He was different from most of the militia. He was clever. Not just wily or street clever, though he was that as well. But he read books. He thought about things. He was able to stay one step ahead of us all the time.”

  “Sounds a nice chap. Decent. Caring.”

  “He was pathological. Something in his brain wasn’t right. He was happiest when people were screaming in pain. We met a lot of evil in our struggle against the Indonesians, but no one as far gone as him.”

  The waitress came and collected our empty bowls and handed us a bill. It was a hint. The early lunch crowd was arriving, and our table was needed.

  “When they got you did you tell them anything important?” asked Rohan.

  “Not much. I held up pretty well. And then I escaped. That was God’s work. It was a miracle. My guard got sick. Rushed outside to throw up and dropped his key. I didn’t even have to use any weapons. I thought it might be a trap, so they could shoot me escaping. It wasn’t. I was gone in a flash.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. Wow. I escaped. But I couldn’t get Jacinta. They had her in a different barracks. They killed her. Dumped her body with friends where they knew I’d hear about it. Then it seemed they’d infiltrated us better than I’d realized. They went on a rampage. They killed or captured most of the men in my unit. Only a few were able to escape. We were defeated.”

  “What about you?”

  “I went berserk. I’d lost Jacinta. The only girl I’d ever loved. I went crazy. Attacked two soldiers on a night patrol. Didn’t have a weapon. Didn’t care. Knocked one out and tried to strangle the other. Nearly succeeded, until another patrol arrived and I had to run. I got a gun from one of the men, with six bullets in it. I spent about a week sleeping in fields. I wanted to get Alberto. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find him. But I used those six bullets. Six soldiers gone. The army had men everywhere looking for me. They seemed to know where all our safe houses were. After another week I calmed down. I realized it was hopeless.”

  “You surrendered?”

  “No, of course not. I was able to gather a few belongings and I escaped again. To Jakarta. I spoke fluent English. There was no trouble finding work. For the first time in my life I had regular money. And I lost my faith. I forgot about God.”

  “I thought He helped you escape.”

  “He didn’t help Jacinta escape. I became an expert on the nightlife of Jakarta. Spent all my free time in the company of cheap alcohol and even cheaper women. I did a lot of brutal things to those women. I was bitter, and all my adult life I’d become used to violence. So I didn’t stop, just because I wasn’t a freedom fighter any more. I can’t even bring myself to tell you some of the things I did. I’m pretty ashamed just thinking of them.”

  “A bit of the self-hatreds. Hey, I’m often there myself.”

  “I’d lost Jacinta. I’d lost my mother. My missionary parents were long dead. And then one morning I woke up in a bar covered in dried vomit and blood and alcohol and with a bargirl lying dead nearby. I still don’t know how she died. I don’t think I did it. But I knew I needed to change my life. I decided to come to Australia and look for my father. I didn’t have anyone else. So I started making enquiries, and I located this guy Grant Stonelea who was running a smuggling operation, bringing Indonesians into Australia.”

  “You’re an illegal immigrant. Hmm. Didn’t realize that. Lucky I’m not into blackmail.”

  “They’d probably give me a visa. But I don’t want to spend a couple of years in a detention centre while they decide.”

  “Fair enough, I guess. And what about Alberto and the Dili Tigers?”

  “Alberto had a name for me. It’s what he screamed at me when they were giving me the electric shock treatment.”

  “What was that?”

  “He’d found out about my background. He always called me orang Australi kecil. The Little Australian.” I paused. “That’s what the man on the phone - the one who made the threats, last night and right after Grant died – that’s what he called me.”