Black Water (16 page)

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, so 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 know 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.

He hadn’t been into a
kampong
since the coup and counter-coup. He crossed the rise of a precarious bridge made of bamboo and old planks, towards the slum where tumbledown shacks lined the bank, overhanging the water in places as if they might fall in at any minute. The cement wall of the river was broken in one place and a soil bank led down to the water, where women were washing clothes. Laundry was strung up everywhere around the shacks: an inside-out way of living, he always thought, in these tiny little houses, everything done communally – privacy just one in a long list of things denied the poor.

He strolled round a few squares of the
kampong
, nodding to the women sitting on steps with their children. In between the shacks and the dirt paths were small ditches intended to forestall the floodwater, with concrete slabs to allow people to cross into the shacks. The ditches were only half full now but as the daily downpours increased in intensity, the inhabitants would be first ankle-deep, then knee-deep in the brown water. A few people stared back at him, mildly, without hostility. Despite the city in ferment – the tortured Generals, the fear, the persistent tension in Merdeka Square and on the wide boulevards of central Jakarta, there seemed to be no changed atmosphere here. No one rose from a doorstep and went inside at his approach; people nodded and smiled.

A coup only happened to the people it happened to, that was what struck him then: that was what the likes of Johnson forgot. The grand events were Johnson’s whole world, and his, to a certain extent, and yet to the people here, those events were a mere backdrop against the perpetual problem of where to find rice that day, how to pay for it, where to put your belongings when the river rose.

At the end of his circuit, on his way back to the bridge, he came across a group of elderly people, milky-eyed and skeletal, who stretched out their hands but were either too weak to mutter entreaties or too pessimistic to think him worth the effort. He brushed past them. A man like him giving out coins would be the talk of the
kampong
. At the sound of calling and chattering behind him, he glanced back to see he had acquired a posse of small boys, jumping and smiling. He smiled back, shook his head. They followed him, nonetheless, until he reached the bridge. As he mounted it, he looked behind to see that they had stopped on the
kampong
side, as if the river was an invisible wall that they could not pass through, although they carried on jumping and smiling and calling.

On the other side of the bridge he was immediately in the area of middle-class bungalows where this Parno man lived. He was hot and thirsty now, regretting his walk around. He hoped Parno would serve something cold.

Only two minutes from the river, the streets were quiet. The bungalows were long and low with the same terracotta-tiled roof running the length of the
blok
. Parno’s building was at the end, tucked into a corner. As he approached it, he could hear the distant, hypnotic gongs of gamelan, fading – it was a sound that filled him with a strange calm. He must have heard it as a child, he thought. This had been a quirk of his few months on Java: new sights, new sounds, new smells, but so many of them tugged at something in him, some unconscious memory, or maybe he just felt as though they should.