The Canal House

by Mark Lee

  We walked up the gangplank and an older Indonesian man with a wispy mustache appeared at the railing and spat blood into the water. He reached into a bag hanging from his belt and I realized that it wasn’t blood at all, but the brick-red spit from chewing betel nut. Some Indonesians believed siri pinang returned the blood of your birth back to the ground, but as far as I could see, it just made your teeth rotten.

  “Not permitted,” the old man said.

  “We’re looking for Dr. Cadell.”

  “Must go way!” He spat again.

  “Hello, there! What’s the problem?” An older European man with a Dutch accent appeared on deck. He wore leather sandals and dirty tennis shorts. “May I help you gentlemen?”

  “We’re looking for Dr. Cadell.”

  “Ahhh, you mean Julia. Pak only knows the first names of our passengers.” He spoke quickly to Pak using an island language. The Indonesian spat one last time, then turned and walked away.

  “Sorry, gentlemen. Pak is rude as hell, but he’s a good first mate.” The Dutchman unfastened a rope and allowed us to come aboard. “Welcome to the Seria. I am Captain Peter Vanderhouten. You work for Hand-to-Hand?”

  “No. We’re journalists.”

  Vanderhouten rolled his eyes. “Please don’t mention my name in your articles. I’m neutral about everything. No politics. No opinions. I do a lot of business with the Indonesians and they’re angry about East Timor.”

  “We’re friends of Dr. Cadell,” Daniel said. “Is she on board?”

  “Yes. She just came back from Government House with Mr. Seaton.”

  Vanderhouten led us down the port side of the ship, past the loading crane and the open cargo bay. I looked into the hold and saw pallets holding sacks of cornmeal and bottles of cooking oil.

  “What do you carry when you’re not working for Hand-to-Hand?” Daniel asked.

  “Coffee beans. Tea. Dry squid. Cloves. We’ll go anywhere. Load anything.”

  “Ever been to East Timor?”

  “TimTim? Sure, lots of times. There’s a sand bar at the east entrance to Dili Harbor. You have to come in slow through the channel, then turn west toward the wharf.”

  We reached the starboard side and saw Julia, Richard, and Billy standing near the railing. All of them wore blue T-shirts with the Hand-to-Hand logo. Billy had gotten a sunburn and the skin on his head was red and peeling.

  “Good evening,” Daniel said. “Anyone want to be interviewed?”

  “Daniel! Nicky! Welcome to Australia!” Richard smiled and shook our hands. “When did you get in?”

  “Just a few hours ago.” Daniel was standing near Julia, but they avoided looking at each other.

  “Where are you staying?” Billy asked. “The Carlton or the Saville?”

  “The Top End,” I said. “It’s over by the Holiday Inn.”

  “Right. I know where it is.” Billy didn’t look impressed. “That’s the one near Lizard’s Bar.”

  “Billy and Richard are staying at the MGM Grand Casino just outside of town,” Julia said. “It’s a perfectly hideous place with ugly old people tugging at slot machines.”

  Richard looked amused, as if he had just encountered a child who hated ice cream. “It’s quiet, comfortable, and everything works.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference where anyone stays,” Julia said. “I doubt if we’re going to be here long.”

  Any sign of government control had vanished in East Timor, and Dili was being looted. After the independence vote the militia began forcing people onto boats to take them down the coast to the Indonesian province of West Timor. Julia described the violence as calmly as a State Department spokesman, but her hand trembled slightly when she pushed back her hair. Daniel began staring at her and that made me nervous. I still remembered Richard bursting into my bedroom at Westgate Castle.

  “Well, I better get back to the hotel,” Richard said. “Time to catch up on e-mail and see what’s going on back in London.”

  “You’ll check at the airport for the next shipment?” Julia asked.

  “Of course. We’ll go there tomorrow morning.”

  Billy winked at me like we were fellow conspirators. “Come and have dinner at the casino,” he said. “Wednesday is lobster night.”

  The moment they left the ship, Daniel stepped forward and embraced Julia. “I missed you,” he said.

  “Missed you, too.” They broke apart, still holding hands, and Julia smiled at me. “Sorry for the public affection, Nicky. Haven’t seen this one for a few months.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m going to look for a cold beer.”

  Daniel touched his canvas shoulder bag. “I’ve got the phone. I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”

  I walked around the wheelhouse, heading for the gangplank, then heard footsteps. Julia had followed me. “I’m glad you’re here, Nicky. I really am. Daniel said you had some doubts about coming along.”

  “I still do. But everything’s going to work out.”

  “Of course it will.” She gave me a quick hug.

  Hiking up the steep walkway to downtown Darwin, I found a group of clapboard houses halfway up the hill. It was the Stella Maris Centre, a low-cost dormitory for sailors coming into the port. There was a bar in one of the buildings—a big open room with ceiling fans and louvered windows. I bought a schooner of Victoria Bitter, sat on the deck and looked out at the sea.

  I had always been sensitive to the first signs of weakness in a couple’s relationship. When two people were falling out of love, someone would always act sad or a little too happy. Daniel and Julia had come back together without effort, and their separation hadn’t changed anything. In some peculiar way, I was involved with what had happened. I was their witness.

  WE STAYED IN DARWIN for nearly a week before the UN peacekeepers invaded Timor. Billy hired Tig Collins and Harvey Briggs, two Australian security consultants, in order to get defensive weapons for the ship. Collins was the younger of the two, a blond surfer with a can of beer glued to his hand. Briggs was an ex-cop from the Northern Territory, broken-nosed and broad shouldered; he reminded me of a professional rugby player. Both men strutted around the main deck with their assault rifles, coming up with emergency scenarios. What if Malaysian pirates attacked the ship? What if the Indonesian navy tried to seize all the supplies? I felt like I was listening to two Hollywood screenwriters getting ready to pitch an action movie.

  With these two jackaroos, it was easy to see the virtues of Billy Monroe. Billy was calm and confident. He realized that you could anticipate problems but never predict the outcome. One day, Collins showed up with a “croc sticker”—a sheath knife with a fourteen-inch blade. Slashing the air with the weapon, he proceeded to tell us how to kill someone in two seconds. “Really?” Billy kept saying. “Is that so?” His right arm shot out, there was a twist and a leg sweep, and Collins was lying on the deck with the knifepoint pressed against his neck. “Better keep practicing,” said Billy. “Those crocs are pretty damn tricky.”

  Every morning, I would leave the hotel and walk down to the coffee shop on Stokes Hill Wharf. As the light changed and the ocean turned from blue to dark green, I’d order a cappuccino and read the Northern Territory News, a local tabloid with comforting headlines like KANGAROO ATTACKS PICNIC or STOUT LOVERS IN A FROTH. By the time I reached the sports section a large crocodile would inevitably appear a hundred yards from the wharf like a dark piece of wood floating in the water. The croc would drift toward the harbor, looking for a stray tourist. Daniel would leave the Seria and join me for a cup of coffee.

  We would sit there for hours, talking about the stories Daniel had written during the last few years. I remember a long conversation about the black-market diamond trade, the pit mines scratched in the red dirt of Angola and Sierra Leone, and the Lebanese merchants with their secret airstrips. European politicians as well as American intelligence organizations were involved in the business, and Daniel explained how the diamonds were sold and how we
apons were purchased for warlords and how a handshake between two men in Paris led to rape and murder in Africa.

  Julia spent her days on the Seria, making sure that the emergency supplies arrived from Sydney. She had to assume that there would be no electrical power in Dili and that the harbor equipment had been destroyed. Everything carried on the ship had to be taken out of their heavy cargo containers and strapped onto wood pallets. The job had to be finished in a few days, but Collins and Briggs refused to lift anything and Richard was usually back at his hotel. The Indonesian crew hated taking orders from a woman, but Julia ignored that and acted as if of course they would obey her and of course this would get done. Wearing a wide-brimmed sun hat, she paced back and forth on the dock. Blankets go there. Tents go there. Please get me some more water bottles. Right away.

  Daniel and I offered to help, but Julia turned us down. “You do your job,” she told us. “I can do my mine.”

  Our job was just a lot of waiting around. Early in the afternoon, we’d leave the hotel and meet a crowd of other journalists at Stella Maris. The beer was cheap, and we could have our own table and buy a good lunch for a few dollars. I met several Australian photographers and a Spanish journalist who had spent a lot of time in Rwanda. On the second day, the famous Tristram Müller of Der Spiegel arrived from Germany.

  Tristram weighed at least three hundred pounds. He carried the bulk well, moving in a slow, steady manner like an oceanliner passing through the water. The layers of muscle and fat seemed to insulate him from the shocks of the world. Tristram’s editor kept calling him at five o’clock in the morning. “She wants the German angle to the story,” he said. “When we finally get to Dili, I should look for blown-up Volkswagens and militiamen wearing lederhosen.”

  The German angle to the East Timor story became a running joke at what we decided to call the Stella Maris Social Club. Someone would announce that he was getting the Spanish angle on a new bottle of beer while a young photographer named Mulvaney would come up with complex Australian conspiracy theories that involved the forced consumption of Vegemite. We played pool on the coin-operated table and gossiped about the television journalists who hung out at the bar in the Carlton Hotel. “They’ve all brought flack jackets and army helmets,” a British reporter told us. “Bunch of bloody poseurs. Wartime Charlies. You watch what happens in East Timor. They’ll stay out at the airport, get a recording of gunshots, then bleed in fake bang-bang when they do their broadcast.”

  Daniel sat a few feet back from the crowded table and sipped his beer. He rarely said anything, but everyone knew who he was. Tristram Müller cornered me outside the men’s room and asked if Daniel had cancer or some other serious illness.

  “Of course not,” I said. “What gave you that idea?”

  “He isn’t like he was in Sarajevo. He reminds me of my father in the hospital room. Quiet, but watching everything.”

  Before sunset, Daniel would leave the social club and walk down the hill to the Seria. Usually I’d go back to my hotel and watch television, but one night I took a cab out to the MGM Grand and had an expensive dinner with Billy. After threatening me at Westgate Castle, I figured he owned me that much.

  “Eat up, Nicky. You’re my guest,” he kept saying. “Order dessert. Order some brandy. Have some fun before the crucifixion.” Afterward we ended up in the casino where I lost eighty dollars playing blackjack. There were no windows in the casino. No clocks or newspapers. Aside from the cricket match showing on a big-screen TV it was difficult to know if you were actually in Australia. Billy said it was a very American hotel, but it was more than that. America was the Snake River or downtown Memphis or the Blue Ridge Mountains—some location that was distinct in my memory. The casino was part of the growing worldwide nation of the Same. You could be in Cairo or Kathmandu, but you could still find the same pastel-colored furniture and piped-in music, the same bottled water and strip of paper on the sterilized toilet seat. No pine trees or fresh-cut clover. No smell at all.

  ON OUR FIFTH DAY in Darwin, the Telegraph called and said it wanted an article and photograph about Hand-to-Hand. Daniel wrote five hundred words and e-mailed them to the paper while I boarded the Seria with my camera. Interfet, the UN military force, was sending the nine navy ships north to Dili. When I entered the cabin, Julia and Richard were trying to decide if they should leave with the convoy. Richard studied a map of East Timor lying on a gray steel table.

  Tig Collins stood in the shadows behind Richard and clutched his assault rifle. You couldn’t tell that he was a total idiot and that Darwin was as safe as the pope’s bedroom. Julia stood on the left side of the chart table. She was beautiful and pale and tired from loading all the cargo. Captain Vanderhouten sat on the right side of the table, his face half buried in his hands. You couldn’t tell that he was hung over and annoyed about missing his afternoon nap. Instead he seemed frightened and worried about his ship.

  I knelt down on the floor like a true believer and shot upward so that Richard appeared tall and powerful when he made his decision. And it was fake and I knew it was fake, but it was easy and a damn good photograph and I had to take it.

  The Seria left Darwin that evening. Twelve hours later, my photograph of Richard appeared on the front page of the Telegraph and in several other newspapers around the world. Editors were drawn to the image and they believed that Richard was a hero. Because the camera doesn’t lie.

  16 INTO TIMOR

  Like most of the journalists in Darwin, we’d been trying without success to get on one of the first planes going to East Timor. But after my dinner at the casino with Billy, Daniel and I were both moved up on the list and the Australian military command offered us body armor, ground pads, and food rations. We turned it all down, of course—too much weight. I was already carrying my cameras and Daniel had his sat phone and computer. We decided to bring along a change of clothes, a packet of Australian and American dollars, a few drugs and bandages, tropical chocolate bars, and four large water bottles.

  “And buy a hat, Nicky.”

  “I hate hats. I look stupid in hats.”

  “The heat’s going to get you,” Daniel said. “Not the militia.”

  WE WENT TO WAR in a taxicab. Early Monday morning, the driver picked us up at the hotel and took us out to the Winnellie military air base. It was still dark, but the parking lot near the runway was crowded with armored personnel carriers, military Land Rovers, and Australian soldiers bunched up in platoons. The Australians wore green-and-brown camouflage uniforms and combat helmets instead of their usual bush hats. Everyone was strapping on body armor, backpacks, and web belts heavy with supplies. The extra gear made the soldiers appear large and formidable, until you saw their faces. Most of them were no more than twenty years old and Daniel talked to a soldier from Alice Springs who was only seventeen. They looked pale and tense beneath the security lights. Several platoons didn’t have enough ammunition and their sergeants ran back and forth, borrowing rounds from other units.

  A soldier was crying beside an armored personnel carrier, but when I went over with my camera a captain rushed up and said that he was going to send me back to Darwin. We started arguing, but Daniel slipped between us and spoke with a calm, soothing voice. I’m very sorry about this. He won’t take a picture. Daniel took my arm and pulled me away before the captain could change his mind.

  “Come on, Nicky. Let’s just get on the plane.”

  “It was a good shot.”

  “I agree. But I don’t want to lose you before we get to Dili.”

  Just before sunrise, the first transport took off, heading to East Timor. Three more flights left the air base before we followed a platoon of soldiers up the ramp of a C-130 Hercules. The inside looked like the long, ribbed belly of a whale. Canvas benches had been attached to both walls and two other benches ran up the middle. The Australian soldiers sat facing us, each man holding his rifle and a bottle of purified water. I checked my cameras one more time while Daniel studied his flash c
ards with phrases in Portuguese, Indonesian, and an island language called Tetum. “Stay buckled in!” shouted a sergeant. “If you feel sick, just lean over and spew on your boots!”

  Our plane had a few small windows and I twisted around to look outside. The ocean was milky green close to the shore, then cobalt blue as we passed over deep water. We approached Timor from the south and began to fly across the island. There was a flat coastal strip, then tall mountains at the center covered with dense tropical vegetation. Dirt roads followed the ridges like the blurry lines from a brown crayon. The cargo plane reached the north side of the island, banked hard to the right, and flew toward Dili. A gray haze covered the harbor area and black plumes of smoke drifted up from oil fires. It looked as if the entire city was burning.

  Our plane landed hard and taxied to the end of the runway. The pilot kept the engines going as the ramp went down and we quickly got off onto the tarmac. It was hot and sticky and there was a bitter smell in the air, as if someone had been burning tires and old cans of paint. The soldiers from our plane jogged over to three military Land Rovers, but when Daniel and I tried to follow them a corporal jumped out of the driver’s seat and began shouting at us. “Get off! No room for journos! You’re on your own!”

  I hesitated, wanting to remain with the soldiers, but Daniel turned and started across the runway. He showed the same lightness, the sense of detachment, that I had first seen in Africa. “You know what, Nicky?” He glanced back at me and smiled. “I like that new hat of yours. It’s got character.”

  “It’s just a tourist hat. I bought it at a souvenir shop where they sold fake didgeridoos.”

  “Maybe it’s a tourist hat, but you wear it with a certain flair.”

  The airport terminal consisted of three small buildings with steep metal roofs that were supposed to resemble the thatched tops of island huts. The red roofs were the first things you saw crossing the runway. They seemed to float above the banyan trees that surrounded the terminal area. Passing through a broken fence, we entered the airport waiting room. Plastic tables and chairs had been kicked over or smashed through the windows. Feces covered the floor and some of it had been smeared on the walls. We stepped carefully through the trash. Daniel motioned to my camera and I took a few photographs.