Eileen lit another stick of incense to the god whose gilt-framed portrait stood on top of her chest of drawers, beside portraits of her Papa, Dr Sun Yat Sen and Jesus. Eileen also had a picture of Chairman Mao, but she kept that in a drawer with her jades and the fortune sticks. Eileen had thrown the sticks often in the past few days: each time they had spelt luck. She had been lucky that Sutrisno had at last decided to go to Singapore; she had been lucky that he had told her where he was going to eat there; she had been lucky to have to pay no more than a $100 bribe for her exit visa; she had been lucky in finding an intermediary to contact the triad, whose members would be waiting outside the restaurant for Sutrisno and who would cut his throat and roll him into the gutter. The vice-president of the Japanese Hardwood Importers’ Association, who would be with Sutrisno that evening, would think twice in future about doing business with Indonesians who robbed Chinese. Indeed, the Indonesian government would have to think more seriously about the sort of citizens it was promoting as indigenous entrepreneurs. ‘Three birds with one stone,’ was a favourite expression of Eileen’s Papa.
Eileen’s flight was at six o’clock the following morning. She would receive a telephone call that night from the intermediary, then go to a small hotel run by some friends from Canton, to sleep, and from there to the airport. Her landlady and her maid believed she was going to Jogja; if the Indonesians were clever enough to think of looking for her, they would look in Jogja, in the hotel where she had pre-booked a room. Soon she and Papa would be finding loopholes again.
Alex had heard stories about the host of the Balle Masque: Claude Barrieux had lived in Indonesia since before the Revolution. He had helped the revolutionaries buy arms and had retained persona gratissima status, and his plantations, as a result He was said to be one of the richest men in the East.
Sinclaire adjusted his burglar’s mask. ‘Claude’s parties are always interesting. Of course, he’s a pederast.’
‘Why “of course”?’ Alex asked.
‘Only compelling passions make Europeans stay permanently in Asia.’
What nonsense, Alex thought. But she was not going to argue with him: he had been so kind and attentive, so like the Anthony of childhood, who had taught her how to swim underwater, how to dive from the three-metre board, how to jive. On school holidays, when they were skiing, she had cried every night because Anthony was allowed to go to après-ski parties, where he jived with girls who wore high heels and nail polish. She had wished to die when she had seen him kissing one of the girls, who was fifteen and sophisticated and who had run her fingers through Anthony’s hair as he kissed her, pushing her up against a fir tree. ‘She’s very pretty,’ Alex had said to him later. He had shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. You’re much prettier,’ he had replied, and she had turned scarlet with adoration for him. Tonight she had sat on her bed while Anthony had pulled dresses from her wardrobe, deciding which one she should wear with the black cat mask he had bought her.
Claude looked like a wily old French peasant. His skin was weathered to the colour of caramel—he liked to hint that his mother was a Malay, though in fact she had been Italian. He was wearing a blue fisherman’s smock and a beret.
‘Oo am I?’ he greeted Alex.
‘Picasso?’
‘Clever pussy cat! Anthony, darling, let me kiss your both cheeks. One pussy cat, one burglar. That is wonderful. We have fish, we have chimpanzees, we have Fu Man Chu, we have the Baron like a Viking … Take a glass of champagne.’
The servants were dressed as devils, with small black horns and eyebrows painted into peaks. Claude had no electric lights in his reception rooms—he often told newcomers that he had no electricity at all, but relied on kerosene, which was a lie. His ‘little Djakarta pied à terre,’ as he called it, had been a plantation bungalow and was decorated in period style. There was no piece of furniture in the reception rooms made after 1900. An opium couch adorned the foyer. Baron von Bloomstein, in long cow horns and a rope beard, was sitting on it, chatting to a man with a red giant’s face. The giant was having difficulty pouring champagne through his wooden lips.
As Alex and Sinclaire walked past the giant turned to the Viking. ‘Doesn’t that suit him!’ the giant said, obviously referring to Sinclair’s outfit.
Sinclaire stopped and spun round, his pretty, sharp teeth showing under his burglar’s mask. ‘Actually, I was going to come as a fairy,’ he lisped, ‘but I lost m’wand.’
The giant tossed its head.
‘Who was that?’ Alex whispered as she and Sinclaire walked on.
‘Ashby, the stupid bastard.’
They walked forward into the softly-lit gloom. A number of guests had, like Thornton, chosen the full-face Javanese and Balinese dance masks, so that Alex and Sinclaire found themselves shaking hands with Hanoman, the monkey general; a selection of yellow-faced princesses; and a Chinese lion with a heavy horsehair mane and bare feet.
‘I am being terribly hot,’ said the lion. ‘And I have lost my hind legs.’
‘Who are you?’ Alex asked.
The lion waved a hand with diamond and ruby rings on it. ‘That is being against the rules. If you are not knowing, I cannot tell.’ It swayed its head from side to side. Sinclaire pulled Alex away.
Conversation in the first reception room was unusually stilted and people were drinking quickly. Besides water, there was nothing to drink but champagne. In the next reception room a film without sound track was being screened upside down on a wall. Harpo Marx was galloping along, upside down, on an ostrich. A group of guests wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods was crouched with foreheads bent to the floor, watching the show and chattering to each other. They were, Sinclaire said, Claude’s Indonesian ‘nephews’. The other people watching the film were not talking. The giggles and squeals of the Ku Klux Klan rang weirdly in the silent room.
‘Marxism! It’s communist subversion,’ one of them yelled; the others pummelled him, and they all rolled about on the floor like sinister puppies. The other guests, another devil and a Javanese princess, sat rigidly on their chairs.
Sinclaire, with his black mask, looked more than ever like a wolf as he glanced around him in the darkened room. ‘You see how people are disoriented by the masks? Everybody is off-balance and behaving oddly … Claude designs his entertainments to shock people—not to scandalise them, but to surprise them. He has a malign sense of humour.’
The film room opened on to a terrace where a small Javanese orchestra was playing. Standing near the orchestra were four young Indonesian women with extravagantly long eyelashes, wearing Western dress.
‘They are too beautiful to wear masks,’ Claude said. He had come up behind Alex and Sinclaire. ‘I said to them, “Just come to my little party in normal dress. No tricks”,’ and he moved on.
Sinclaire was laughing to himself. ‘The one in silver-lame is a former presidential mistress—that gives any girl a special mystique. But she’s not nearly so rich as the woman standing next to her. She’s a wife of the Old Order governor of the State Bank, who’s going on trial next month. He embezzled virtually all the country’s foreign exchange and spent it on his wives. He’s rumoured to have twenty-eight of them, which must be rather expensive when they all like diamonds and baby Mercedes and shopping in Rome. Nice earrings she’s wearing.’
Alex snorted. ‘I’m getting more and more fed up with things that go on here.’
‘Are you, Alex? Are you really? I thought you only disliked the foreigners and the New Order.’
‘Don’t tease me.’ She longed for Maruli; for decent people like Hadi and his wife. She longed to be away from this smart party, with all its smart and dishonest guests. The champagne was already working and muffled laughter was emerging from behind the wooden faces, while the little devils hurried around in bare feet, filling glasses. She and Sinclaire fell into desultory conversation with the Portuguese consul, a soft-mannered man whose family owned one of the most famous collections of Chinese ceramics in Europe: his forbears
had stolen them from tombs. With modest pride he explained to Sinclaire how he had arranged to buy several pieces from the collection of the Djakarta museum. ‘Only export ware, of course. But interesting. In Europe one could not buy such things for ten times the price. Oof.’
The little devils were sliding between groups, murmuring, ‘Dinner is served’ in three languages.
The buffet’s centrepiece was two whole lobsters standing on their tails on a huge platter and clasping each others’ claws as though dancing. They danced on a rippling pink sea of prawns coated in aspic. There were roast quails and venison to follow. People complimented Claude, who shrugged and said, ‘An old man must have some pleasures.’
Alex was thinking of Maruli again as she accepted some lobster and avocado salad. She pushed the pale, seductive flesh about on her plate, wondering what he had eaten that day—probably lumpy rice and vegetable soup, if anything. Sinclaire was observing her: she was very badly shocked, almost in a daze. She had hardly spoken all evening and had stared with fixed hostility at the Portuguese consul, and in the same manner even at Sinclaire when he had tried to amuse her with scandalous anecdotes about their fellow guests. The thought occurred to him that she might do something irrevocably foolish and self-destructive.
‘Alex,’ he said softly, ‘Maruli has only been arrested. He has probably not been charged, he has not been tried, he has not been sentenced. Remember that. And remember you have friends who can help. Bisa diatur. The law here is a flexible instrument.’
She looked up. ‘Yes. You’re right. I must think of that.’ She was smiling a little.
‘Shall we dance?’ Sinclaire asked. While dinner was being served a pop band had been setting up its instruments in the film room. The party rule was that guests had to re-mask themselves after eating. A princess had already departed to dance with Fu Man Chu and Claude was jigging with a member of the Ku Klux Klan. It was an eerie sight. Sinclaire held Alex lightly as they danced: the band was playing out-of-date Beatles’ music. Suddenly the red-faced giant cut in on Sinclaire.
‘My turn, burglar,’ it said.
Thornton Ashby was well lit with champagne. He seized Alex around the waist and squeezed her against him, hurting her breasts. She began to pull away.
‘What’s wrong with you? Don’t you like dancing?’
‘Thornton, stop it. You’re hurting me.’
‘It’s those bumps you’ve got.’ He began to titter, then suddenly freed her and lifted off his mask. His face was flushed and he was barely able to focus. ‘What’s it matter who sees me now? Your cousin Snake Face knows I’m here. Let him stare. I don’t give a stuff. Thornton Ashby went to Claude’s party! So what?’ He danced like a bear, plodding up and down, occasionally bumping into people. ‘I really like you, Alex. Although you don’t like me. You don’t like me, do you? You said you don’t.’ His eyebrows were at eccentric angles.
‘I don’t like being used, Thornton.’
‘Is that all? Being used is nothing.’ He swung out his arm and hit a chimpanzee in the face. ‘Sorry, old chimp. Ha! Get that? Old chimp.’ He bent down to Alex’s ear. ‘You know why they’re wearing masks? So nobody will know it’s men dancing with men.’
It was perfectly obvious that a majority of the couples dancing were people of the same sex.
‘Hypocrites,’ Thornton added. He had difficulty pronouncing the word and had to repeat it.
‘And what are you, Thornton?’ Alex asked.
‘I invited my wife to this party tonight, but she didn’t want to come. She doesn’t like my friends. She forces me … what’s it matter? Let’s do the cha-cha.’ He hopped up and down, went forwards and backwards, like a train being dangerously shunted. His giant’s face jumped around on its elastic at the back of his neck. ‘Bloody thing’s choking me,’ Thornton said, and broke it off. ‘Catch, Snake Face,’ he called and tossed it towards the bar on the edge of the dance floor. Sinclaire fielded it. Other people were removing their masks; a certain recklessness was taking over. Claude’s Ku Klux Klaner turned out to be not a boy, but a schoolgirl about twelve, still padded with puppy-fat. The presidential mistress and the twenty-third wife of the governor of the State Bank, each of whom was dancing demurely with Italian diplomats, exchanged glances.
‘Hullo, Auntie,’ the child called to them, and poked out her tongue. Claude tickled her and she rolled on the floor, squealing.
A green fish-head, through which pink human lips protruded, moved up to Thornton and Alex. ‘Nice to see you, Thorny,’ it said to Thornton. Alex disengaged herself and joined Sinclaire at the bar. Thornton had clasped the fish and began whirling around the floor with it. In due course, he began to kiss it. Lots of other people were kissing each other. The presidential mistress was looking at the Italian Second Secretary with huge, soft eyes. The fish pulled off its head to reveal the rather plain, thin face of a Norwegian who worked for a shipping company. Thornton had become indifferent to observation: he gazed into the man’s pale eyes, and, during a slow dance, sucked one of his earlobes.
Sinclaire had a grin the size of a banana split. ‘I would not have believed it,’ he said to Alex. ‘Thornton’s come out of the closet. Of course, he’s pretty safe with this crowd. He makes sure Julie meets nobody but the Americans and the Brits, and there are none of them here tonight.’
‘I’ve been entertained,’ Alex said. ‘Can we go?’
The devil barman held up a bottle of champagne. ‘Two glasses left. Please drink,’ he said. One of his horns was askew and a dribble of black paint was running down his forehead from an artificial widow’s peak. Sinclaire turned to take the bottle.
‘Oh, Christ!’ he said.
Three late-comers had entered the room and were standing, gaping, on the edge of the dance-floor. They were Meredith, her Filipino, and Julie Ashby.
Julie was staring directly at her husband, whose eyes were closed and whose tongue was searching in the recesses of the Norwegian’s ear. Even in the faint light of the room Alex could see that Julie had turned dead white. Her mouth opened, but no sound emerged. Then, suddenly, a terrible howl.
She howled for what seemed like minutes, then turned and ran.
The dancing stopped, the band stopped, people were looking around blindly, some pulling on masks and adjusting their clothes. Thornton was standing alone now on the dance floor, looking confused. He asked people, ‘What, what … ?’ They moved away from him. The scream seemed to have smashed the room, so that what had, a moment before, looked elegantly raffish now seemed chaotic. Shoes littered the floor; clothes were strewn about on chairs; a monkey-mask had been hooked on to one of the hanging lamps and a stone carving of Ganesha, the elephant god, was wearing a matelot’s cap. It was no longer amusing and chic; it was ugly and disordered. Claude had hurried to the band and spoken to the leader, a boy in a sequinned shirt who had been ostentatiously smoking a gandja joint.
‘Conga!’ he shouted, and the band whanged into When the Saints Go Marching In. Claude, snapping his fingers, started the conga line.
It had all happened in the space of two or three minutes.
‘Let’s get out,’ Alex said. Her flesh felt cold; she thought she was going to faint again. Already twenty people had joined the conga line, laughing and singing. Even Thornton was stomping up and down in it, like a mechanical bear. Meredith and her Filipino had left, running after Julie.
‘That poor woman,’ Alex said several times to Sinclaire. He was gripping her arm tightly as he led her towards the door; he, too, thought Alex was going to faint. Her skin was burning with fever.
There was a stone bench in the front garden, behind which a large jasmine bush grew. The jasmine perfume was piercingly sweet and heavy in the night air.
‘You sit here for a few minutes while I get the car,’ Sinclaire said.
Alex slumped on to the seat, smothered by the exquisite scent. There was nothing much in her mind, only exhaustion and the echo of Julie’s scream. She tried to remember something, some phrase
she had heard during Sukarno’s speech which seemed apposite both to the discord of the party and to the emptiness inside her head. But the words would not come back; she could feel only the nauseating sweetness of the jasmine pressing into her face. And then somebody, Anthony she supposed, was carrying her, and they were riding through the dark and the rotting stench was coming from the canals.
13
At intervals people Alex knew came into the bedroom, gave her things to eat and drink and took her temperature. She chatted to them and went back to sleep in mid-sentence.
Sinclaire strolled around the garden directing the workmen he had hired to build a servant’s room for the guard he had employed for Alex. The new guard was his houseboy, Wagimin’s, brother. Sinclaire had made it clear that if any more robberies occurred at Alex’s house both brothers would look forward to being unemployed. If there were no robberies, Wagimin’s brother, like Wagimin, would be given some farmland on the outskirts of the city. Sinclaire had already summoned the police and had made a statement that, returning home on Friday night, he had discovered the robbery. Madam was now prostrate from shock. The policemen asked why Madam had not employed a guard, to which Sinclaire replied that this had indeed been a foolish oversight. Itji and Aminah had stood by, nodding vigorously.
Monkeys in the Dark Page 17
