Island of Demons (50 page)

From the shadows, my ladies leapt to prominence and Smit, on reflex, took off his hat as his men gawped and started sniggering behind their hands, like schoolboys in the presence of smut.

“Alright sergeant. Take the men outside. Two to guard the door. Ten minute cigarette break.” He turned to me, thrust his hands in his pockets and began nervous ball-juggling. There was nowhere to sit but the bed. He wasn't going to do that, so I did, gathering the sheet to hide my undress. “There's more to this than boots,” he asserted. “Anyway, as it is, the Germans are stamping all over Europe with
their
big boots. Where's Spies?”

“Walter?” I raised both hands in a delicate gesture from Balinese dance to express my innocence. “I have no idea …” I struck my thigh, through the thin stuff, as in one of Charlie's hammy films. Careful! Soon I would break into a song and dance routine from one of Noel's musicals. “You know of course that he has a house at Iseh? – where he paints? – I expect you will find him there. What's all this about?” I rubbed in his disappointment, mimed puzzlement. “Did you expect him to be at home? Isn't everyone out at parties, having fun anyway? It is New Year, after all – for us Europeans that is. Unless, of course, you've gone native.” I fair beamed benevolence at him. Walter was, of course, not at Iseh or anywhere in that direction. With a bit of luck, he was already in Java, being looked after by friends in the administration, all shunted there from Bali by the new Governor General. He would throw them all off the trail by walking, on little paths, to Singarajah and rendezvous with a car there. In Java, he would be safe.

“I've got my eye on you, Bonnet.” He delved deep into a pocket and juggled unhappily.

“That's comforting to hear,
controleur
.”

He gestured at my harem. “Don't think I don't know what you get up to with the ladies of the night on the
lapangan kota
but we can't – as yet – touch you for that. One of the traditions of the Indies, I suppose.” He lit a cigarette, blew smoke, threw the used match loutishly on the floor. “We might be able to do you for underaged girls.” He nodded at the paintings. “Some of those look pretty young to me and all these pictures should add up to a good long stretch behind bars, get the right judge, but that's a can of worms we don't really want to get into. That's only natural, after all. This is all about boys, corruption of male minors. Nasty. How come a Dutchman spends so much time with a” – he sneered – “shirt-lifter?” He paused, confused, Balinese seldom wore shirts, among women only prostitutes. “A sarong-lifter?” That would not do either. Male and female both wore sarongs and, in my experience, Balinese were quite finnicky about “lifting above” things of the below. “A pillow-biter?” But a fixture of the Indies was the tubular pillows, known as “Dutch wives” that you wrapped yourself round at night to allow air to circulate. We all drooled on our pillows.

“What about ‘flower-boy-fancier'?” I suggested urbanely but a quiver of fear had crept into my voice. Jail? Under the sheet, I was slick with sweat. I cleared my throat. “In the old mountain villages, all boys who have their adult teeth but are, as yet, unmarried, are so designated. They are held to be particularly suitable to serve as vessels and vassals of divinity.”

He grinned, despite himself, and plunged his hand back to grip his privities, like the little flower-boys do whenever they feel insecure. “I think that might fit nicely. Our colonial children must be protected.”

“Look. The only ‘boys' in Walter's life are the houseboys who, as you are well aware, are far from being children – the appellation a matter of social station, not age. The fact is, all sorts of people pass through Campuhan, male, female, Balinese,
bule
. Walter is very popular. Barbara Hutton – I believe – wanted to marry him. You surely can't imagine he sleeps with them all. I would guess that Walter is a very cool man sexually. You will be saying next …” I stared him coldly in the eye, “that I sleep with him.”

Smit mouthed distaste. “No need to be offensive.”

“The fact is that Walter has done more for the Dutch and for the Balinese than any other single person I know. The last Governor General would never have put up with this.”

Smit sighed. “The last Governor General did not realise the trouble these damn foreigners cause, constantly interfering in Dutch affairs and setting themselves up above the law. The sooner we're shot of them, the better. Teach them a lesson they won't forget. The last Governor General did not have a son-in-law with similar vices or a wife who made his life hell about it.”

“Hell”, “wife” – I immediately thought of his own embittered, psalm-singing soulmate. So, judging by the look on his face, did he. This could be their ticket back to the Hague or, at least, Weltevreden, the trim Dutch quarter of Batavia, gardeners, trams, ladies' tea parties on the manicured lawn and all the other provincial comforts. That would draw her fangs a little.

“Well, I'm afraid you'll have to come with me. It doesn't end there. We'll need a statement and you've still got questions to answer. For God's sake, man, put on some white man's bloody clothes!”

As I struggled into a pair of presentable trousers and a shirt, Smit turned, shocked, away from the sight of my undress and contemplated the heaped-up, naked female flesh, unabashed. Outside, the men shambled to their feet, tucking snuffed smokes into top pockets, and fell in around me. I did not, of course, recognise my acquaintance from the
lapangan kota
. It appeared, to my relief that, for the moment at least, I was merely a witness and thus not subject to handcuffing. In the various courtyards we crossed, the silent palace residents gripped flickering torches of
damar
resin like extras from La
Bohème
and peered at me in curiosity, as though I were someone they had never set eyes on before. As the first rays of dawn struggled up from the east and I was hauled, trembling, up into the rear of the truck, I am sure I heard an excessively matinal cock somewhere crow once and then a second time.

Arrived in Denpasar, it seemed to me that the eyes of the by-now-rising Dutch residents were similarly eloquent, as I was frogmarched into the administrative buildings. “There he goes,” their looks said with satisfaction. “The dirty bugger. Thought he was better than us and now he's going to be shamed in public, shown up, stripped bare, humiliated, thrown out of the country. It'll be in all the newspapers and he'll never sell another painting again. Serves him right. Someone should write to tell his mother.”

The architectural icons of the eastern empires affect the grandiloquence of Greek classical styles but reduced to the proportions of the Indian bungalow. On the main administrative building, whitewashed and fluted Doric columns towered up a full ten feet to support a complex entablature incorporating the Dutch royal arms executed in soft plaster and picked out in gloss paint. I was led beneath it and across a sort of grey-hued reception area, down endless corridors, along a covered outside walkway fringed by spiky plants and through various locked, metal gates. It was only when a leprous iron door was thrown open and I was pushed into the dark interior, that I realised that this was the town jail, entered – appropriately – from the rear. As the door clanged shut, Smit's chuckling voice said, “Oh, by the way, Happy New Year”, like a hat, flung in contemptuously after a drunk. Then silence. I went and sat on the bed.

I sat there, more or less, for two days. There was little else to do. It was a bare cement cell, perennially damp, with an unglazed, barred window. No furniture apart from the cot that came with a thin kapok mattress, a palimpsest of every possible form of nocturnal incontinence. Above the bed, someone had scratched a crude caricature of buggery as though in welcome or admonition. Yet it fired my imagination. In my mind, during the empty hours, I painted over it an elongated mural, depicting the life of the Indies. Against a frond and wave-draped background, muscular farmers, wiry sailors, insinuating, robed Chinese, held aloft the wealth of the archipelago – calculating each paintstroke and mixing each colour in the pallette of my head. I cursed myself for my lack of prescience. I had brought no cigarettes or matches, no money to buy provender or suborn the loyalty of the visibly Balinese guard in his blue cotton uniform. Young, swarthy, with broken teeth, it occurred to me that he might, himself, be a prisoner here. Nevertheless, he brought me food three times a day, rice and undifferentiated slop – neither exactly hot nor cold – not unlike my daily dole from the Cokorda's kitchens really but resisted all attempts at conversation or ingratiation. This is unheard of in the Indies, so I deduced that he must be acting on explicit orders. My excretory functions were dealt with by a chamber pot, emptied by the same guard once a day into a fly-buzzing bucket, brought for that purpose and already containing the effluent of others. It was of identical design to the one in which he delivered my drinking water and my disordered mind dwelt obsessively on the circumstances in which they might be confused. More troubling, I had not brought my supplies of quinine and other specifics. I could feel myself weakening at the whine of each questing insect.

After two days, the door opened again and the Trappist guard beckoned me out and led me back through the gates, the maze, the grey hallway and into an office dominated by a large, old-fashioned desk. This was the age of new technology, so the desk was dominated, in turn, by a huge bakelite telephone, the size of a flatiron, with a crank on the side, to ring a bell and so attract the attention of whoever was on the other end. Before it, sat a stranger, looking down at a dossier, with Smit off to one side.

“This,” said Smit, glowing with pride, “is Mr Tonny van Diemen, a special investigator from Batavia.” His awed tone connoted that Tonny knew anyone who was anyone, dined with the Governor General on a weekly basis, kissed his wife's hand as well as the G.G.'s arse, and – no doubt – made appropriately risqué jokes about his son-in-law in all the best gentlemen's clubs of Batavia. Tonny raised an eyebrow at something in the dossier and closed it softly. I could see my name on the front. Walter might not have a file at HQ but I clearly did and was genuinely surprised at how thick it was. Tonny was a man in his early fifties, sleek and groomed, dressed in a black suit and – God help us – a waistcoat that made no concessions to the climate. Thus, he would have dressed in a premium legal practice in the Hague. It was immediately clear that his well-manicured sensibilities never engaged the grubby, real world, merely the pieces of crisp official paper to which it was reduced. He appraised me with quick, dark eyes and clasped his elegant hands together to preclude any further courtesies.

“Mr Bonnet,” he said smoothly. “
Controleur
Smit tells me you may be able to help us in our enquiries into this terrible business. I am sure you would welcome the opportunity to clear your name of any taint of involvement that might prejudice your further stay in our fair colony.”

“As a Dutch citizen …” I began, ponderously.

“As a Dutch citizen, you have a duty of loyalty to your motherland, Mr Bonnet. Now what information do you have of the whereabouts of the renegade Spies? Your own tastes, I note from your dossier, tend in a different but no more creditable direction. Your debauchery of that poor young girl was, I am sure, nothing to write home about.” He twirled an elegant pen, suggesting that he, Van Diemen, might feel compelled to do that writing home. “I remain convinced that you know something.”

“Look,” I said. “I don't care a hoot what you are convinced about, I …” The phone rang with a derisory little strangulated tinkle. Van Diemen snapped his fingers and pointed – as I thought most rudely – and Smit grabbed it. There was no whispering into phones in those days. You shouted. The person on the other end shouted too. Then what you heard through the earpiece was a pale, crackly voice barely emerging from the hiss and rumble of the static.

“What? When? Where? All right tomorrow. I'll tell him.” Smit put his mouth to Van Diemen's ear, cupped his hands and whispered, Tonny vigorously nodding. He turned to me with a triumphant smile.

“There now, Mr Bonnet. It seems we need detain you no longer. We have apprehended Spies in Singaraja, found in a car stopped at a checkpoint. No doubt he was seeking to escape to Java. He is being brought back under guard.” I suspected another trap.

“I can go?”

“Oh you can go all right,” said Smit. “In fact, we insist upon it. At the moment, we're rather short of cells you see and we expect to make many more arrests. Get out but don't you try to run away to Java.” I rose and paused. There were a hundred things I might have said, that I wanted to say, but there was no point. Already, they were chuckling clubbily. I had ceased to exist for them. I opened the doors and walked out into the hall, feeling uncomfortably light, like a man who has accidentally left his jacket and suitcase on a train. I was hungry, had not a rupiah to my name, no way to get home. A lanky figure rose to its feet.

“Rudi!” It was the Greg. I was suddenly, pathetically, glad to see him. I hugged him solidly. I wanted to cry. My nurturing father, my
Barong
.

“How? Why? When?” reprising Smit's telephone conversation. The hallway was full of the kind of loungers who always fill the hallways of government buildings. Waiting is an art form subsidised by governments. They stared at us, scratched and yawned, looked hopeful and expectant.

“We were in Australia when we heard the news. Jane insisted on coming back so we couldn't let her travel alone, poor little thing. At least Colin got out. That's the main thing.”

“Yes,” I said. “That's the main thing.” Greg had been transformed into a wealthy planter, white suit, panama hat.

“You look like hell. Did they give you a bad time, old man?” he asked, patting me awkwardly on the back as one might a muddy and over-enthusiastic dog. Being British, he lacked a gesture for this situation. “I heard they'd taken you in, so I climbed into my best too-good-to be's and came right over.”