Tree of Smoke (77 page)

As soon as they’d all seated themselves again, the prisoner resumed his mindless down-staring. His head hanging. Really motionless. Slumped. Staring at his own face reflected in a cup of bitter karma.

For three-fourths of an hour the judge read words from a stack of documents, going over all the ins and outs, deliberating aloud to himself, from the sound of things. The Chinese youngster just sentenced had run guns for William French Benét; so had many others. The judge went over the list of counts on which Benét had been found guilty here. He referred to the prisoner as “a major dealer in illegal arms; a scourge on our lives; a trafficker in our very blood.”

Storm realized the back pew was the wrong place. Nothing prevented him from getting up and sidling along the rows until he sat right behind the prisoner.

Sands turned around at the disturbance. Saw Storm. Recognized him. Turned away.

The judge looked small behind his gigantic desk. He called the prisoner “an imposter and a psychopath.” He ordered the prisoner to rise and sentenced him to be bound with rope, flayed with a cane, and hanged by the neck until he was dead.

They had the Old High Court tricked out like a state capitol. But two blocks away was Little India, where Storm had taken a room. He walked upright through crowds kowtowing at his feet in the streets while public address systems screeched the Islamic afternoon prayers. Wild streetside commerce: a soothsayer lying on the asphalt on his back with a black kerchief covering his face, mumbling predictions. His partner chanted over a collection of rust-colored human bones, including a cranium, arranged on a red scarf around a white hen’s egg. They were peddling tiny charms made out of gold foil from “555” cigarette packs and dirty string. The partner lifts the lid on a box, a six-foot cobra rises up, flaring its hood. He backs the cobra down with one of the powerful charms, dangling it in front of the reptile’s hissing face. A man nearby displays a pile, a good five pounds, of teeth he’s yanked successfully. They’re all here from the demented corners of the Far East with their straw mats and immortality pills. Various elixirs for enlarging the human penis; also, for the same purpose, a somewhat frightening-looking device of belts and rings. And photo albums showing cases that have responded. Herbs, unguents. Concoctions of every sort. Medicinal roots preserved in glass jugs, floating like amputations.

He entered a small clothing store. Its atmosphere almost unbreathable with incense. Impossible to move in here without rubbing against the silk, the rugs. Outside, the mosque still shrieking. The Hindu women standing still and looking at him. Beautiful. Three of them. One stared hard and must have been the mother.

“I’m here to see Rajik.”

“Mister is waiting,” she said.

“Through here?”

“Yes. Again. Like yesterday.” Yesterday? Her fantastically lovely face, and a deep coldness behind it. He hadn’t seen her yesterday.

He passed through a curtain of painted beads, through its depiction of the god Krishna among bathing virgins at a waterfall, and into darkness.

“Come there…It’s fine…Just here.”

“I can’t see.”

“Wait for your eyes.”

Storm moved with care toward Mr. Rajik’s voice and sat on a cushion on a stool.

Mr. Rajik raised his hand to pull a string and ignite a constellation of dim Christmas lights behind him. He was an ordinary-looking Hindu man at a table with a tea service, no expression on his face. “I’ll just make a few inquiries. Will you answer?”

“Ask me and see.”

“In the period of the last week, or even a little longer…have you looked at any time to the place where your shadow would be seen, and yet you saw no shadow?”

“No.”

“Have you seen a black bird?”

“Thousands. The world is full of black birds.”

“And one that you noticed in particular? Because it didn’t belong there—I might give you the example of a bird inside a house, or a black bird perching on your windowsill. A sort of thing such as that.”

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Have you seen something—any kind of object, any kind of…Again I’ll use an example: You crumple up a piece of paper, and it resembles someone’s head. Or a stain of some discoloration on the floor—something that resembles someone’s face, the face of someone close to you in the past. Have you seen a thing like that in the last couple of weeks? A thing that suddenly showed you the face of someone close to you?”

“No.”

“I am going to say a prayer for you. What will the prayer be?”

“You tell me.”

“No, I can’t be the one to tell you. It’s not my place. It’s your place to tell me what you would say if you spoke to God.”

“Break on Through.”

Mister was going to do a silence thing now. As if he didn’t speak English.

“I can write it down for you.”

Mister reached up and turned out the small lights. His hands rustled among his pockets and he struck a match and lit a stick of incense. The dark curved like a tunnel around them, like solid walls. Very sweaty nauseated hit now. “Gots to go, man, if you want to be fucking with me like this.”

Mister blew out the match. Nothing now. “Your eyes.” In twenty seconds the tiny red ember on the incense became visible, and the little eye that went with the voice, or the nose—this thing was the face, it was all he could see, and it was talking. “To break through—you are saying as through a boundary.”

“‘Break on Through,’ it’s a song. It’s my philosophy, my motto. You ask me for the word, that’s the word I’m gonna have for you. Break on Through.”

“Come back tomorrow.”

“That’s what you said last time.”

Mister spoke without urgency, very gently. “Have I asked you for any money? Do you feel I’m not to be trusted? So I say to you, come back tomorrow. I can’t give you today what I don’t have today.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Do what you have to do. Yeah.”

As Storm came within a couple of meters of Pudu Prison’s massive sheet-iron gate, he felt the heat of the morning sun banging off it into his face. The guard at the entrance slid a panel aside and peered at Storm out of the dimness of his cubicle, stared at his letter of introduction, which was in English, and made a phone call. Storm waited in the street for several minutes before the guard opened the man-sized metal door in the concrete wall.

A tall youth in civilian dress led Storm through the courtyard, where two dozen guards drilled for parade in green and purple uniforms. Ugly bastards. But soon they’d hang Skip Sands, so here’s to them.

Storm stood outside the warden’s office with the letter identifying him as a journalist named Hollis, the name on his Australian passport. A letter calling him a journalist wouldn’t do him much good. He understood that. Storm had attached to it a note of his own, explaining to the warden that he also represented a charitable group and wanted to visit the prisoner strictly as a humanitarian, not as a reporter.

Manual Shaffee, director and warden of Pudu Prison, greeted Storm cordially. “I apologize once again very much,” he said, “for our policy which prevents me from allowing you inside the prison.” But Storm was already inside, here in Shaffee’s office with the pictures of the nine sultans overpowering one wall, the air greenly lit by one circular neon tube overhead.

Shaffee was a little fat man of Indian descent with the pie-shaped and mustachioed face of a cartoon rodent and a jacket frogged with gold braid, and five different medallions on each mortarboard epaulet. Also, on his chest, ribbons. The impression he conveyed was one of idiotic sweetness.

“Are you a Muslim?” Storm asked.

“No.”

Storm said, “I myself am a Christian, sir.”

“So am I!” the warden said. “I am converted. Believe me, I don’t like to hang people.”

“Please give Mr. Benét this note, okay? I talked to his lawyer already, and I think I saw the prisoner give me a nod at the sentencing.”

“It’s completely against all regulations.”

“I’m here in a humanitarian role. I’m asking you as one Christian to another.”

The warden insisted Benét would refuse him in any case. He pronounced the prisoner’s name as Benny. “Benny wants no visitors,” he told Storm. “Benny was even rude to the Canada consul.”

“What about his family?”

“Nobody comes. Canada is too far.”

“Make sure he understands I’m the guy who talked to his lawyer. I think he’ll see me.”

“But Benny won’t see you. I can only keep telling you that. Benny spit in the Canada consul’s face. Doesn’t that lead you to some conclusion about Benny?”

“I’m pretty sure he’ll see me.”

“He has refused all visitors. Otherwise I could help you.”

But having fixed on this strategy, having made it Benét’s refusal rather than his own, the warden now felt compelled to make Benét prove it.

“If you will please wait,” he said, and dispatched a guard to talk to the prisoner. The warden lit a cigarette while Storm listened to the guards drilling out in the courtyard, in unison slamming their rifle butts down on the cracked concrete.

Sands and the guard stood together outside the door. Shaffee beckoned them with a tortured look.

Sands-Benét came in barefoot, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. And it was nice to see him looking so bad, wrecked in his eyes and skinny, nice to see him looking like a prisoner.

“Can I talk to him by myself?”

“No.”

“Five minutes.”

The warden’s face shut, and Storm dropped it.

Storm said, “How’s life?”

“Boring, mostly.”

“Do you smoke?”

“I finally took it up.”

“You got any cigarettes? These Malaysians smoke Three Fives, I think.”

“Yeah,” Sands said.

“I’ll give a couple cartons to the lawyer.”

“Thanks.”

“He pretty good?”

“Good enough to get paid while I dangle.”

“You understand the deal here. I’m just a humanitarian, a fellow English-speaker.”

“I get it.”

“Benny’s consul came to see him,” the warden said, “and he spit.”

“You’re my first visitor.”

“Try spitting at me.”

Sands stared at his bare feet.

“Warden Shaffee’s a nice guy,” Storm said. “That’s why he’s letting me talk to you. He wants to make sure you’re comfortable.”

“The thought of getting out of here would comfort me.”

“Not possible, man. You’ve been found guilty and sentenced, and there’s no fooling around here. Eighty-three people have been convicted under the new gun laws, and eighty-two have hanged.”

“I know the numbers.”

Storm asked: “And how do you feel about hanging?”

“No comments!” Shaffee said, though nobody had asked him.

Benét shrugged. “Hey, at this point, it’s okay by me.”

“No comments,” Shaffee repeated. “But I am a Christian. I think you know my answer.”

Storm took a step closer to Benét. “It’s time to think about your soul.”

“Don’t be daft!”

“I’m offering you a chance to clear your conscience.”

“I haven’t got a conscience,” Sands said.

“So hanging doesn’t make you shit?”

“I’ve lived too long already.”

“What about Hell, you fuck?”

“We’ll have time to discuss that later. You and I. Lots and lots of time.”

“Benny’s got books. He has all kinds of reading matter. He has a Bible,” the warden said.

Sands stared at his own ugly bare feet and spoke very softly.

“What did he say? What was that?” the warden said.

Storm said, “Tell me who to see.”

“For what.”

“Old Uncle.”

“He’s dead, man. He’s dead.”

“Yeah? So were you, supposedly.”

“And soon I will be again.”

Shaffee’s unease was palpable now. He indicated the guard: “I have a witness. I am nearing retirement in a few months. I could get in a lot of trouble.” But he did nothing to stop this. He seemed incapable of the slight rudeness needed, at this moment, to enforce prison policy.

Storm stepped closer. “Will you pray?” He bowed his head. “Dear Lord,” he said loudly, and then more softly, “I know you’ve got family in the PI. And I can find them.”

He stepped back and watched the prisoner shake like a toy until even the stupid warden noticed: “He’s sick? What’s wrong?”

“It’s the power of his conscience,” Storm said.

“Here,” the warden said. “Sit down. Yes. The struggle.”

Now Warden Shaffee and Storm stood there like a couple of prisoners, and it was Sands sitting in the warden’s chair.

Sands gripped the edge of the desk with both hands and looked back and forth from one hand to the other. “Ju-shuan, or something like that. He runs a trap up in Gerik. They call him Mr. John, or Johnny.”

“Give me directions.”

“You don’t need directions. He grabs every Euro who comes off the bus.”

“And he’s the man to see.”

“If you feel the need.”

“See him for what?” the warden said. Not that he didn’t get it. He got it, he got the whole thing, but he just wouldn’t let himself see he’d made a mistake.

Shaffee had already failed to prevent this conversation. The best he could hope for now was to dominate it. “The two Australians who were executed got no help from their embassy,” he remembered now. “We’ve had a lot of foreign prisoners—drugs traffickers and those such people,” he said. “I’ve never seen an embassy take so much interest. The Canadians are very helpful to Benny. Benny’s got books, things like that.”

“You’re gonna hang,” Storm told the prisoner, “but life goes on and everything plays itself out. Inside of every cycle is another cycle. You know what I mean?”

“I hear what you’re saying, man. But I don’t know what you mean.”

Storm leaned close over Sands and said, “It’s just a machine. Relax.”

“As long as you leave my family out of it.”

Shaffee said, “We are civil servants. Please. We have our rice bowls, we want to keep them filled.”

“You’re not who you think you are,” Storm said. “You’re dead inside.”

Sands said, “Look, whatever kind of revenge you want—you’re not gonna get it.”

“Things have to play themselves out.”

Sands stood up. “We didn’t pray.” He beckoned him close.