Drive-by Saviours (16 page)

Robadise pulled out his police-issued notepad and pencil and scratched some notes before saying, “Bah, that's just your own guilt, Bumi. Your own regret. I don't know why you don't just return to Rilaka and see them. Anyway it's nothing to do with this boy. Please help me solve this case. Everyone is in a panic. There's a killer loose here.”

Bumi shook his head and took a deep breath, relieved that Robadise didn't seem to suspect him, and dismayed at his old friend's new simplicity. He wanted to ask him, the one who'd saved him from the headmaster's persecution in school, how he had become so simplistic. “Not everything boils down to good and evil,” he told Robadise, believing it in his head if not his heart. “Not every crime has a culprit, regardless of your police training.”

Robadise rose red-faced, cheeks puffed, towering over Bumi, chest thrust forward. He exhaled sharply, turned, walked toward the door. Over his shoulder he said, “Give it some more thought, Brother. With a brain like yours I'm sure you can find the culprit. I'm sure you'll help your brother.” He closed the door behind him.

“It's not a crime,” Bumi said softly to the closed door, “just a tragedy.” He prayed to Allah to absolve his sins. A new thought was seeded in his brain: perhaps one of those strangers who refused to provide their names and purposes was the true villain. Or maybe one of the other strangers who gave their names and purposes was a liar, and had come to murder children.

THE NEXT MORNING A SECOND CHILD, A FIVE-YEAR-OLD GIRL WHO
lived a few streets away, began choking soon after her breakfast and died en route to the hospital. Her autopsy showed no signs of poisoning or abuse. She had simply stopped breathing. Although there were no signs of foul play Robadise was convinced that a serial killer was loose. He convinced his father, a high-ranking member of the local force, that it was the only explanation.

Bumi prayed with increasing frequency and length, having no other recourse or way to disprove his worst suspicions of himself. Yaty watched him at night in their bed with that sad, tired, flat look on her face. “It'll be alright,” he'd say, convincing neither of them.

Special forces were deployed from all over the city, as well as the nearby township of Mariso, to find the killer. “Will they find him?” Bumi asked Robadise.

“I've been a cop for eight years,” Robadise said. “This is my first chance to do something great. This is not about personal gain.”

In the evenings Bumi observed Robadise from a distance as he and his colleagues scoured the neighbourhood for clues. Robadise gave occasional updates to the family. They ruthlessly interrogated suspicious characters including homeless glue zombies, a suspected union organizer and even a couple of flyover Dutch tourists on their way to beautiful Manado. They found no evidence, no clues, but they were undeterred. They were ready to start bashing heads.

Robadise was no longer the happy-go-lucky fool's sage who was satisfied to suck corruption's teat. “Brother,” Bumi pleaded, “surely there is a better way to use your energies than projecting villainy on your own people. Perhaps you could write a mystery novel?”

This advice earned him a quick pinning to the floor, Robadise's dormitory way of demonstrating his power. Through gritted teeth he warned Bumi, “This is no game. Children are dying and you can either put your brains to practical use, for once, or tease like some panty-wearing schoolgirl.” His sweat dripped from his forehead onto Bumi's tight lips and remained there long after his departure from Bumi's room.

Yaty discovered him on the floor an hour later. He was heaving great sobs that jarred his entire body. “Have you finally gone completely mad?” she said. “Please stay strong. Your family needs you.”

“It's my family that's gone mad,” he told her with more authority than he felt. “At least the part of it that was once my brother.”

Still he feared all those unidentified faces passing their gates every day, and the more hazy ones who came by when he was away. Allah knew he had tried to identify them all, but in a city the size of Makassar it was impossible. He had failed the neighbourhood, failed his family.

Yaty helped Bumi scrub her brother's sweat and other contaminants from his body and led him to bed, where he slept fitfully in between pacing, checking the alarm, peeking out the window, worrying about Robadise and watching his children sleep. Maybe they too would fall victim to the child-killer, whomever or whatever it was.

These thoughts crippled him until five o'clock, an hour before the alarm, when he shook Bunga awake. “Did you know this girl who died?” he whispered.

“Yes, Daddy, she was in my class. But we didn't play together. I'm sorry but I didn't like her much. She was very bossy and she thought she could boss me even though she was just a littler kid.”

“Can you tell me anything else about her, Child?” he prodded.

“Not really, Daddy. Why? Did I do something wrong?”

“No, Child, of course not. Do you think you did something wrong?”

“No, Daddy, I've been good. I'm a good girl.” She flashed her patented heart-melt smile and it had the desired effect. Her poor daddy smiled.

“I know you're a good girl,” he assured her. “Just make sure you are very careful nowadays. I don't want anything to happen to you. For the next little while you come straight home after school and stay close to your grandma.”

“But why, Daddy?”

“These are dangerous times, Child. I don't know why those two kids have died, but the police are everywhere now. Anyway, it's dangerous right now, it seems. Just be careful.”

His concern, stress and frustration were obvious even to a small child. She kissed his cheek and put her arms around his neck so as to crush such negative emotions with gratitude and love, and she succeeded. He kissed her eyelids signifying that the moratorium on night-time rousers was over, and it was once again time for her to sleep.

THE THIRD CHILD TO DIE WAS MOHAMMED, ONE OF BUNGA'S
closest friends. The first two deaths had troubled and fascinated her. Mohammed's death changed her. She stopped speaking. She wouldn't eat, despite the constant placement of food to her lips by her grandmother and questions to her ears by Robadise and his reluctant accomplice, Bumi.

Yaty issued a cease and desist order to the two men. “Give the child space to breathe, if not to mourn,” she admonished them, and the volume of her words made them temporary law.

For three nights Yaty held her child and soothed her with gentle cooing. For three days Bumi lived in the torture chamber of his mind, arguing with himself about the cause of death: himself, some other maniac or some non-human cause. For three days Yaty's mother, Ibu Eni, quietly prepared Bunga's favourite dish,
gado-gado
, more than the whole family could eat for supper.

On the fourth day when the child ate half her plate of
gado-gado
, her
nenek
congratulated her with a suffocating hug, enveloping the little one with the many folds and flaps of her old body. Bunga squirmed and pushed and struggled her way free and cried, “I want to go play at the canal.” To her
nenek
's puzzled gaze she explained, “Mohammed may be there waiting for me.”

Bunga's explanation sent Eni into a fit of pitiful tragic moaning and wailing, with salty tears that pelted the child with grand-matronly drama. Bunga again squirmed and struggled free from her
nenek
's oppressive emotion and ran for the opening door and straight into her father's arms.

Scooping her high over his head and down again for one of his patented nose rubs, Bumi took great delight in the sight of brown peanut sauce creating a clown's mask around Bunga's lips. “So you finally decided to eat?” he said.

“I want to go play at the canal,” she said. She squirmed herself free, looking back over her shoulder toward her
nenek
.

Bumi frowned to hide his elation. “Okay Child, let's go play at the canal. You've been inside too long anyway. But first I have a few more questions for you, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. “But please keep it short, I really need to see if Mohammed is waiting for me. He might be.”

Bumi sat down heavily, allowing his daughter to land unceremoniously in his lap. “He's not waiting for you, Child,” he told her flatly. “He's gone.”

“Gone to Paradise,” Eni said from the kitchen door at the far side of the living room where they sat. “He'll wait for you there, Child. You'll see one day. It will be a long wait for him but he will be patient.”

Bunga rolled her eyes at her father, who rolled his back. “Yes, in heaven,” Bumi shouted so Eni could hear. “Right, Child?”

“Yes, Daddy, one day.” Then she whispered, “But what if he is waiting for me at the canal, and not in Paradise at all?”

“Why do you think he's there, Child?” Bumi whispered back.

“Because that was our favourite place to play. And last week I was going to meet him there. But then Arun asked me to skip rope so I did that instead. He may still be waiting for me. I should have gone there before.”

While Bunga agonized, Bumi's mind identified its latest example of the only anchor he'd ever known in all the world's confusing plethora of stimuli: a pattern. “So, you and Mohammed liked to play by the canal, hey?”

“Usually me, him and a few others play there every day, but he was so mad when I didn't go even though I promised. He wouldn't even talk to me last week. So I just didn't bother going since then.”

“What about the neighbour boy, what's-his-name?”

“Ichel?”

“Ichel. He liked to play by the canal too, ya?”

“Ya, all the time.”

“And how about that girl, the one you didn't like.”

“When she came to the canal, that was when I usually left,” she said, and quickly added, “God rest her soul.”

Bumi rolled his head back as far as his neck would allow, opened his mouth and felt most of his blood march into his head. It helped circulate the maelstrom of thoughts and his oldest nemesis: questions. What to tell Robadise, if anything? Could it be just a coincidence? If the canal was a causal factor in the deaths, was Bunga in danger? How could this important source of water for the city turn on a few innocent kids? Damn questions.

WITH BUNGA SPEAKING AGAIN, THOUGH STILL NOT HER USUAL
effusive self, the house expanded slightly, loosened and softened. Yaty could sleep again, Robadise could focus more on finding a culprit, Eni cooked a little less and gossiped a little more, Bunga focused her energies on keeping Baharuddin's spirits high as he tried in vain to make proper words come out of his mouth. Even Eni's husband, Nurkin, juggler of a million men's needs for sensitivity, discretion, stealth and management of discrepancies, relaxed. At home he was a man of few words, and most of what he said pertained to logistical matters and the administration of bathroom time, mealtimes, work schedules and other mundane matters. During the few days after Bunga regained her appetite and tongue, Nurkin was seen to smile on three occasions, one of them when Bumi stepped into a large pothole filled with an unknown, tar-black liquid.

Only Bumi remained high-strung. He was working out how to find causal factors in the children's deaths, a logistical challenge since his presence in the house was expected after his long work shift. Robadise dropped incessant hints about clues but Bumi wanted to gather proof or at least some hint of cohesion to his theory before presenting it to his irritable brother and his inherent ‘bullshit detector,' which all cops feel blessed with even if in some cases it is nothing more than the same prejudices that curse us all.

Bumi had no time to visit the canal himself and had given Bunga an absolute ban on going there. Some sort of evil was lurking there, and he suspected its form was more bacterial than human. If questions and doubts were his brain's ultimate nemesis, bacteria were next in line to destroy his body. And if patterns were his genius, practical solutions were his idiocy. So bound to routine and familial duty was Bumi that he could conceive of no way to visit the canal alone, despite a deep, gnawing need to disprove his worst fears about his own guilt. He was left with no choice but to confront Robadise in the study with his theory and no proof. He vainly hoped that Robadise's shared interest in the pattern would prove Bumi's innocence to his nagging mind. The reality of Robadise's mocking response was not a great surprise to Bumi.

“I expected better from you, Bumi,” Robadise said. “You've never been so superstitious before, at least not in that way. Is your faith in humanity that naïve that you think it could not have been a human force behind this evil? Instead you blame the canal. The evil forces of nature, heh? It's creative and would make a nice story for your kids at night, but this is reality.”

“But Robadise there is no evidence of murder here — you said so yourself!”

“There is also no evidence of murder-by-canal, Bumi.”

“Not murder, but perhaps something in the water. Who knows? Surely it's worth exploring. Since you've got nothing else?”