Black Water (32 page)

He lay there, calmly: such insights, lying there, such clarity, waiting for the moment when he would lean over, lift the net just enough to reach out and turn off the lamp, lie back in the dark, and eventually, despite it all, give way to sleep.

In the morning, he would rise, dress, go out onto the veranda – maybe even go for one last walk down to the river. He would extract some dollars from inside the lining of the toiletries bag and place them in the envelope from which he had taken the Institute’s cheque. He would seal the envelope, write Kadek’s name on it and leave it on the desk. After that, it would simply be a question of lifting his holdall over the threshold of the doorframe, descending the steps, taking the case down the path to the car. He had arranged with Rita that he would check into the guesthouse some time in the afternoon and she had said she would get there as soon as possible after work, so that they could have cocktails together to celebrate their plans. In a mirror image of their first meeting, he saw himself sitting at the table in the corner. He saw himself waiting for her, smoking, a little impatient, and how she would glance straight at that corner as she stepped into the bar. She would look at him and smile. Lying there in bed, he smiled back at her.

He woke a few hours later but not violently, merely with a sigh at the derisive note of victory in the ghekko’s cry. Eh-
ur!
. . . the pause, then the continuing. So the goodwill of Kadek and the young woman who made the offering had proved fruitless. The ghekko had still come. He realised that although he had heard it almost every night, he had never seen it.

He lay awake in the dark, quite still, breathing gently and listening to the skittering of the creature’s feet on the sloping wooden roof above his bed. It was nothing. It was only a ghekko. In the morning, it would be gone. In the morning, he would rise. Slowly, gently, he drifted back to sleep, a long fall into unconsciousness as unhurried as a man with a large parachute descending from a great height or a huge leaf detached from a tree on a still day: and as he drifted down, the sounds on the roof began to form a more regular pattern,
pit-pit
, pause,
pit-pit-pit
. It was just the ghekko, that was all, or some other creature, or his imagination – or maybe, yes, at last. It was the beginning of rain.

The idea for this novel came when I was a guest of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival on the island of Bali, Indonesia, in 2012 and would not exist without the generous help of its Artistic Director, Janet De Neefe. My warmest thanks to her and Ketut Suardana for their kindness, hospitality and patience with my endless questions. I am also indebted to many others who helped with research or read the manuscript, in some cases both; in the Netherlands, Dr Revo Soekatno of Wikimedia Indonesia and Adriaan Van Dis; in Indonesia, the Tanjung Sari, Hotel Indonesia Kempinski, John H. McGlynn of the Lontar Foundation, Suzanty Santorius and Yosef Riadi; in the UK, Michael Arditti, Jacqui Lofthouse and Kevin Smullin Brown; and in the US, Dr Clayborne Carson of the King Research and Education Institute and Stanford University, for permission to quote him and for advice on the lives of the black middle classes in 1950s Los Angeles. Any errors in this novel remain entirely my responsibility.

The coup and counter-coup of 1965 led to the deaths of up to one million Indonesians, mostly members or suspected members of the Communist Party, the PKI. The violence included neighbour-on-neighbour killings at a time of great poverty and hardship but much of it was orchestrated by the military and aided by the provision of lists of names by the CIA, then engaged in a Cold War battle to prevent the spread of Communism throughout South East Asia. The existence of these lists is a matter of public record but the character of Harper and his role in the handover of one of them are both my invention, as is the institution he works for.

Private companies working as risk analysts or consultants for multinational corporations and governments have existed for decades and many are active worldwide today. Staff in London and Jakarta working for a long-established firm in this field gave me invaluable help with my research on the condition of anonymity for themselves and their employer. I’m very grateful for the insights they offered into a business that relies on discretion. There is no suggestion their activities are comparable with any of the events in this novel.

Heartfelt thanks as ever to my agent, Antony Harwood; to Sarah Savitt, to Hannah Griffiths and Lisa Baker of Faber & Faber UK and Sarah Crichton of Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York.

Black Water
is Louise Doughty’s eighth novel. Her most recent book was the bestseller
Apple Tree Yard
, which sold in twentysix countries, was shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger and the National Book Awards Thriller of the Year and was a Richard & Judy book club choice. A major four-part BBC1 adaptation is due for broadcast in 2016. Her sixth book,
Whatever You Love
, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She lives in London.
 

fiction
Crazy Paving
Dance with Me
Honeydew
Fires in the Dark
Stone Cradle
Whatever You Love
Apple Tree Yard

non-fiction
A Novel in a Year