by Philip Atlee
Later that night Hatta and I toured Borobodur again. This time by moonlight and without official escort. We did not go up on the terraces but went immediately to a vaulted basement crypt that smelled of dampness and was beginning to sag. At Hatta's direction, and by the light of a powerful hand torch he was holding, I probed at the soft earth floor with a shovel and located and unearthed seven long aluminum cylinders.
The cylinders were stamped with Indonesian figures, and Hatta crouched to examine them. Pointed at one and rolled it aside from the others. I broke open the welded cap with my shovel and found the cylinder filled with gold bars, all holding the proprietary hallmark of the Djakarta mint. I did not realize, until I started counting and stacking the bars, how heavy they were.
I selected one at random and sawed it in two, using an instrument from the kit I had bought in Japan. The saw took bright flakes out of the bar, and their brightness lasted all the way through. Putting one of the flakes on a rock, I dropped acid on it. The gold tested 24-karat fineness. Motioning Hatta's torch beam:loser, I weighed one of the uncut bars on my manual scales.
Then another. They seemed to be standard: four inches wide, two inches high, and all weighed very close to thirty-five pounds. On the official world market the bars were worth about $20,000 apiece. On the speculative market, nearly twice that. I opened another cylinder pointed out by Hatta and found it filled with silver ingots. A specimen of this also checked out pure fine.
It took Colonel Hatta and me nearly two hours to carry the five aluminum cylinders and the other loose bars and ingots back to the Mercedes sedan parked on the road. When we had dumped the last of the bullion into its back seat, I borrowed his torch to inspect the tires and found them dangerously flattened; the springing was bowed.
There was no help for it, and when I motioned with the torch, Colonel Hatta started around the car to get behind the wheel. He had just opened the door when there was a sharp cracking sound from the terrace above us. Hatta groaned and slumped to the ground. Almost on all fours, I ran around the car, switching off the light, and lifted him.
Two more spaced shots sounded and slugs chinked into the hood of the dark sedan. Somebody above, with a nightscope, was zeroing in on the car. I threw Hatta into it and scrambled in. Started it and went careening away down the dirt road. Two more shots chinked through the rear window and buried themselves in the seat behind me. I blessed the engineering integrity of the Mercedes-Benz factory and kept the car floorboarded. At speed, on the dirt surface, it had a tendency to fishtail, because we had not balanced the heavy load.
After we had roared on for several miles and I had not been able to spot any pursuit in the rearview mirror, I tamped on the brake and stopped. Lifting Hatta to a sitting position, I found that he had taken a shot in the abdomen.
When I ripped his shirt and switched on the hand torch, he gasped, "No light!"
"Man, you're hurt."
The thin Indonesian officer nodded, holding both hands across his belly, and told me to drive on. Several miles later, eyes fever-bright, he directed me off the dirt road into a muddy side track. I sent the Mercedes roaring down it, braking when he warned me of a bad bump or curve. We pounded on for another two hours, along the narrow track overhung by tropic vegetation and arching palms that blotted out the moonlight.
I kept praying for the suspension system and tires of the Mercedes to hold out under the punishment they were taking, and they did. We passed through a bright, open glade finally, with Hatta cautioning me, and without warning came on a walled village fringed by towering bamboo groves.
With Hatta directing, I entered it and turned into a shaded drive that led to a large house. When he pointed, I drove the car into a dark outbuilding, switched off the ignition, and got out to help him. Hatta refused help. Came out of the car stiffly, still holding his abdomen, and then put his hands down.
"This is my ancestral home," he announced. "You are welcome in it."
"Thank you," I said. And walked behind him as he went unsteadily toward the dark back door of the big house. He rapped sharply on the door; lights bloomed inside, in two wings, and three sleepy women came to let us in. They all had fine aquiline features and looked like Colonel Hatta. After embracing him, they saw his midriff clothes stained with blood, and their sleepy composure was wrecked.
They cried out in concern, but he spoke to them quietly and went striding on down the dark corridor. I followed and he switched on lights in a book-lined study. Sighing, he sank down in a big molded leather chair and motioned me to a seat across from him. The three aged, handsome women, wearing night-robes, came in bearing a tray of soda siphons, ice in buckets, and two bottles of Cutty Sark.
After the three dark Furies, with faces so like his own, had put the tray down, Hatta beckoned them to him with slender fingers. Dutifully they came forward, kissed him on the up-raised cheek, and backed away down the darkened hall. Only when they were gone and the massive teak door closed, did Hatta allow himself the luxury of lowering his hands.
Watching him, thin head held high as he poured me a large drink, I felt something icy rush down my spine. I had dealt with pigs and malcontents so long that it was upsetting to see a man with style.
I put my drink down whole. The hard driving had left me jumpy. "Colonel," I suggested, "you must get medical help. Is there no doctor in the village?"
"In a minute," he said, smiling. "I must tell you what to do. Then my aunts will treat me. Two of them are nurses. They studied in Leyden, and we have all the necessary medication here in the house."
He leaned forward, filled my glass again with straight Scotch, and fell out of the battered leather chair on his face. I lifted him, balanced him in one arm while I opened the massive door with the other, and was carrying him down the hallway when his three kinswomen removed him from my grasp. As I sat in the study working on the Cutty Sark I could hear their murmurings and the rustling of their gowns.
TWELVE
I AWOKE AT DAWN THE NEXT MORNING, IN a huge four-columned teak bed. Bad-tempered birds were cawing outside the unscreened windows in the lightening gloom of the bamboo grove, and the taste in my mouth was hideous. No wonder. One of the bottles of Cutty Sark was empty on the circular table beside my bed, and beside it was a tray holding a full curry dinner. Which I had not touched.
Lifting the mosquito netting, I swung my bare shanks over the edge of the bed and reached for the water carafe on the side table. It was glistening with sweat beads, still very cold, and I knew that it had been put down there not long ago. Gulping at its contents, I wandered into the adjoining bathroom, where the toilet was only a hole in the tiled floor, and used it.
Shaved myself, which was a chore because the water was cold and every finger had a separate motor in it. When I had hacked away most of the stubble, I turned back into the bedroom and was met by a young and lissome dark girl, no more than fifteen, who smiled at me shyly and set down her tray on the larger table by the windows. I bowed to her.
Giggling, she retreated, and I lifted the beaded cloth that covered the tray. A large goblet of papaya juice, two red-ripe mangoes, dark bread toasted slightly, and a mushroom omelet that turned out to be light as meringue but not so sweet. A silver urn of coffee and another of tea. A silver pitcher of thick cream and what seemed to be an Indonesian version of brioches.
Although I had no way of detecting it, the people in the house must have had some way of observing me. Precisely after I had finished the sumptuous breakfast and was patting at my mouth with the damask serviette, one of the dark-clad aunts entered and said that Colonel Hatta would like to see me.
I followed her down the hall to another bedroom, even more magnificent than the one I had slept in, and found Hatta sitting up with a huge bolster pillow at his back. He was pale but seemed improved and grumbled that the aunts had dosed, irrigated, and flooded him with so much penicillin that he could not see straight. There was another elaborate silver coffee-service on the table beside his bed, and he waved at
it. I poured a cup and he refused one, saying that it could not possibly help his belly punctures.
While I listened, Hatta told me about the village, his possessive aunts, and a strange enclave in history. He was a member of the Djajadiningrat family, which was a fourteen-mile square offshoot of an ancient Hindu community called Badoej. To the world outside, in Indonesia, he was a Hatta, and that name was honorable, but he was really just a Djajadiningrat.
For hundreds of years before any Dutchman came to Indonesia, he said, the family had grown everything they needed within the confines of their territory. Except for one thing. Salt. For that they had gone outside their territory but had insisted always on paying twice the going market price. Because they felt that selling things for profit was immoral.
Nobody, said Hatta proudly, had ever interfered with ambitious males when they wanted to leave the family enclave. Those remaining behind had blessed them and let them go, but had continued to check on their health and prospects by means of forty large jars of water and forty trees. Daily the Djajadiningrats left behind studied these things and could tell when happiness or misfortune befell their wandering sons.
My skepticism must have shown as I glanced up over my coffee cup, because Hatta smiled.
"The bullion has been unloaded from the car. Please drive it back to Djokja. I will come there to join you as soon as my wound has healed."
"Thanks for your hospitality," I said, and stood up and bowed. Hatta's lips quirked, and he bent his own head as well as a man can whose middle body is taped.
I sought out his Djajadiningrat aunts, and they all gave me a half-inch inclination of their heads. As if to say that if Abdul Hatta, that interloper in another world, liked me, I could not be all bad. When I went out the back door to the palm-thatched outbuilding, the Mercedes sedan was riding much higher on its tires.
I drove it back down the shaded track to the Borobodur road, and was parking it in the kraton courtyard when Katja Arnkloo came jiggling her assets toward me in a miniskirt and halter bra. She suggested that we go swimming. Right now, in the rajah's gardenia-filled private pool.
THIRTEEN
MOST OF THE FOREIGN STAFF OF THE Restoration mission was housed in the Merdeka Hotel in Djokjakarta, but Dr. Groslier and his principal aides had apartments in the rajah's kraton. The palace, I was told, was being run on a reduced scale; if that was true, it must have been a whopping operation before. It was really an enclosed city with massive carved walls, and its gardens were bordered by covered walks that held cases of jeweled krisses, elaborate tea services, and other art objects presented by distinguished visitors.
The palace still retained its dancing troupe and private army, and classes of the University of Djokjakarta were held in its squares. It was a pleasant place to live and work. I put in several hours a day writing press releases and progress bulletins on the work, and they were forwarded to the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, which released them to the world press. The ubiquitous Harvard Frank, my assistant, spent his time charming important visitors and Indonesian dignitaries, taking them on safaris to "the diggings," as he called the ancient shrine. These trips usually lasted half a day, and famine was beaten back by frequent stops for caviar and chilled champagne.
Harvard Frank was a cute bastard, or perhaps I should say an acute bastard. Beneath his airy persiflage there was hidden a streak of New England shrewdness. One day he drove me up to see his newly arrived ship in Semarang, the harbor north of Djokjakarta.
She was a beauty. At pierside, docked among the shabby freighters and dilapidated, coasters, the huge junk screamed for attention. Even furled, her tiers of vermilion sails set her apart. Down below she had huge diesels. As we prowled the luxurious staterooms in her high-sheered bow Frank explained briskly that he had already had her sold to a stateside customer for a huge profit.
It is always an inspiring thing to see the true entrepreneur, or con artist, at work, and young Harvard Frank was in the great tradition. Through Colonel Hatta and friends in New York, Washington, and Djakarta, he had lined up enough profitable coastwise shipping contracts to pay for his gaudy Leviathan in less than a year. What he was hauling was connected with our restoration work, of course, and he was being paid through UNESCO. In dollars put into a New York bank. I had also helped in these negotiations.
"My boy," I said, when we were driving back to Djokja, "I expect you will be a financial titan one of these days."
Frank was lolled beside me in the front seat, eating a mango. "Don't grump, Joseph," he admonished me. "Nobody loves a grump. And besides, we only live once or twice…"
"Not grumping," I assured him. "Just plain jealous. What are you paying that crew?" I hadn't counted them, but he had a large crew on the junk, captained by a one-eyed pirate named Ling.
"Peanuts, dad. But to them it's a fortune." He flung the emptied mango skin out the window and wiped his fingers on a white silk handkerchief. "All depends on how you look at it, isn't that right? And there are damned few places left in the world where you can grind the faces of the poor. Mustn't miss the remaining opportunities, must we?"
***
It was late afternoon when we returned to Djokjakarta, and in my kraton office I found a telegram from Colonel Hatta. Asking me to come pick him up as soon as possible. In half an hour, after showering and shaving, I was back in the Mercedes sedan, driving north. I passed Borobodur's sculptured ramparts, gilded by the setting sun, with a funereal plume of smoke ascending from Merapi's volcanic crest.
On this trip, I drove the dirt track to Hatta's Village more slowly than I had before. In the fading light I could see the lush vegetation: towering banyan trees with small figs on them, the smaller trees bearing tiny oranges. Mangosteens, guava, and vaulting coconut palms. As I drove into Hatta's walled ancestral village I noticed that its buildings and homes were all overshadowed by clusters of bamboos over a hundred feet tall. None of the houses or outbuildings were built of bamboo, however, because that was against the law. Plague-carrying rats could infest the prolific plant's conical sections.
This time I was bowed in the front door by two of the raven-clad Djajadiningrat aunts and led back to the book-lined study with the massive teak furniture. Hatta was sitting up and taking nourishment; he looked much better. I crossed to shake hands with him, bowing before his battered leather throne-chair, and straightened to meet his visitors.
Both of them were Japanese. Nogi, the black sumo wrestler, looked huger than ever in occidental clothes;
he held up both hands in mock terror and retreated. I laughed, and we shook hands. The other man was introduced as Professor Hitachi, and when I heard the title, I assumed that he was the man who had been doing the large-scale tests on puromycin. He was also in western clothes but declined to shake hands. We bowed to each other perfunctorily.
When we were all seated, Colonel Hatta crooked a finger and one of the funereal aunts brought in a tray. Hatta and I had Black Daniels highballs, and the two Japanese, warmed saki. We talked awhile about nothing. When pressed for a comment, after some particularly inane remark, I said idly that the mangosteens I had passed on my drive looked lovely. But that they could not compare with the blooming of the ham trees in Iowa. That the ham trees were really Hormel this year, and that might explain why the cows were so readily eating the cabbage.
"Ah, soo…" aspirated Professor Hitachi, who obviously hated my guts.
"Fact," I assured him, and returned his slight bow. Colonel Hatta was seized with a coughing fit, and three of the aunts came rushing in with medications. He waved them away and out of the room. Then he turned to me and said gravely that Professor Hitachi had inspected the bullion, was satisfied as to the quality of fineness of both the gold and the silver, and that he and his associates were ready to conclude their part of the agreement.
When the bullion was made available to them in Yokohama, beyond customs, the professor and his group would turn over to a representative of our choosing the five hundred pounds of puromycin. And,
added Hatta, lifting a square, sealed laboratory jar from the table beside his chair, their people were giving us a 1,200-gram sample of the new drug for further testing, together with a complete set of notes on its use in human populations.
The square jar looked larger than a quart to me, and it was filled with white powder. Hatta asked me if the terms seemed satisfactory to me. I shrugged.
"I'll get the bullion into Yokohama," I said. "You're the man who calls the shots. If it sounds right to you, go ahead."
Hatta nodded. "That's it, then," he said, and the two Japanese got up and bowed, ostentatiously to him and slightly to me. Professor Hitachi walked out, followed by Nogi, who had to duck to get through the study door. Hatta poured me another drink, murmured, "Ham trees!", and we listened to the car drive away from the house.
Within an hour, we were driving back to Djokja carrying the bulky bottle. Hatta had assured me that the bullion would be moved to a guarded warehouse not far from Borobodur and that I would have free access to it at any hour.
***
I needed that access, because in the next ten days I led a dual life. By day, I was PRO officer Broderick, continuing my press work, meeting with Harvard Frank and Restoration Director Groslier, but for several hours each night I was just hard-ass Joe Gall. Supervising shipments between the bullion warehouse and the modern foundry built to aid the restoration work on Borobodur.
This literal moonlighting involved casting all the bullion into a drop keel for Harvard Frank's big junk. On these clandestine shifts, I was supervising the construction of molds for the shaping of the five tons of precious metals as outside ballast. Captain Ling, the one-eyed bandit who commanded the junk, was working with me, together with ten carefully chosen members of his Chinese crew, and Colonel Hatta had recruited the foundry foreman and several of his best workmen. In addition, he had arranged a midnight-till-dawn military guard around the foundry…
