Lunch with the Generals

by Derek Hansen

They lay Annemieke down alongside Lita on cushions they’d stripped from the seats. Jan was helped in to the front seat alongside Djembar, and they began the trip back to Bandung.

  Tears mingled with the blood and stung Jan’s eyes and his head lolled forward on his chest. He’d killed his daughter. He’d killed his darling Annemieke. His heart broke and he fainted away.

  ‘We must pray to God,’ someone said in the darkness. ‘Merciful God will decide.’

  Ramon’s voice faded away as it had on the Thursday before, and not even Neil was anxious to break the silence. Gancio rose quietly from his seat in the shadows where he’d been eavesdropping, anxious not to break the spell. His other lunchtime customers had left long ago. His afternoon staff had left soon after and his evening staff had not yet arrived. There was nobody to disturb the four friends. Gancio was careful as he prepared the tray but the smell of fresh coffee is seductive and the clink of cup on saucer irresistible to those in need.

  ‘Well,’ said Milos at length. ‘You’ve earned your coffee. We all have. You tell a sad story, my friend. Once more you send us home with the weight of tragedy on our shoulders.’

  ‘It is the story,’ said Ramon. ‘I cannot change that. Though God knows, there have been many times when I’ve wished I could.’

  ‘Why do you keep doing this?’ pleaded Lucio. ‘You give us these beautiful women then you destroy them.’

  ‘What would you have me do, Lucio, change my story? Pretend such things do not happen?’

  ‘A storyteller always has the right to vary his story provided the changes aren’t at odds with what has gone before.’

  ‘I am aware of that, Neil, I have done that many times before with stories I’ve created. But this is different. There is no invention.’ Ramon ran his fingers wearily through his hair. ‘What do I have to do to convince you, Neil? This is a true story. This is how things happened.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Neil thoughtfully. ‘I’m beginning to suspect it is.’

  THIRD THURSDAY

  ‘What are you doing to your friends?’ asked Gancio as he met Ramon at the door. ‘Already they are on their second glass of Pinot Grigio. They were all seated by twelve o’clock.’

  Ramon smiled.

  ‘Ah, here is our storyteller,’ said Lucio. ‘We are all here, Ramon, eager for more.’

  ‘Eager, yes,’ Ramon said, as he shook hands with each of his friends, ‘but for Gancio’s creations and the Pinot Grigio. You have never arrived so early for my stories before. Why would you start now?’

  ‘You kept us so late last Thursday we didn’t have the opportunity for our usual post-mortem. So we came early today. That’s all.’

  ‘My apologies, Milos. I promise not to keep you so late today.’

  ‘We didn’t realise you were so familiar with Indonesia,’ said Neil, upfront as always. ‘You have lived there?’

  ‘Did I say I had?’

  ‘No, but it’s a question of detail. How could you have come by all the detail if you haven’t spent time there?’

  ‘I am only repeating what was told to me. The gaps in my knowledge I have filled in myself. Do you think I have no access to books? I read prodigiously. Slowly, but perhaps more thoroughly than any of you.’

  ‘You obviously have a great affection for Java.’ Milos looked at Ramon with his half-smile that made him seem so innocent and harmless. ‘Can anyone acquire such affection from books?’

  ‘Shakespeare did.’

  ‘Detail, yes … affection, perhaps not.’

  Ramon shrugged.

  ‘You picked an interesting place to build into your story.’ Neil was in possession of a few facts and they burned to be aired. Given another life and greater opportunity he would have loved to be a public prosecutor. ‘I looked it up in my atlas and got some information from Garuda. In a land of great volcanoes Tangkuban Perahu hardly rates a mention. And as far as I can make out there’s not much reason to go to Bandung either. I’ll take your word for the fact that you read more thoroughly than I, but you’d have to read a great number of books to find mention of either place. I’m convinced you’ve been there, maybe even lived there, and I don’t understand why you’re reluctant to admit it. What are you trying to hide?’

  ‘Neil, there is no reason for you or I to go to Bandung or Tangkuban Perahu. Indonesia has so many other places which are much more interesting. But some people, like the Van der Meers, have every reason to go there. I told you this story is true. Could I tell it if I did not know the parties concerned and know them well? Could I know them well, without having spoken to them at some length? Really, what are you trying to prove? What is the point of this inquisition?’

  Ramon had kept a smile on his face but the edge in his voice gave lie to it. People at other tables had turned to look at the men who seemed on the verge of a quarrel.

  ‘You should apologise to Ramon, Neil.’ Milos spoke quietly but with the authority of the eldest. ‘He hasn’t even had time to sip his wine and already we’ve bombarded him with questions.’

  Neil looked away, then back at Ramon.

  ‘I am sorry, Ramon. But it’s your fault I get so involved in your stories. And the stories that lurk behind your stories.’

  ‘Neil’s mouth sometimes works faster than his brain. That is his fault.’ Lucio was anxious to placate Ramon and probably didn’t intend to insult Neil quite the way he had. They all turned towards him, speechless.

  ‘What’d I say?’ asked Lucio.

  Ramon began to laugh and Milos joined him, grateful for the diversion.

  ‘Lucio, I think it is your turn now to apologise to Neil,’ said Ramon. ‘Then, when we have all apologised to each other, perhaps we can get back to the story.’

  ‘No apology is necessary. Lucio was right. My brain’s in neutral, my mouth in overdrive. The point is, Ramon, if your story is true—as you insist it is—and it trespasses on your life, then to what degree? What was the extent of your involvement? You must admit you’ve invited our speculation.’

  ‘On the contrary. You are free to speculate but it is not at my invitation. Nor will I be drawn on the subject of my involvement or otherwise. I thought I’d made that quite clear at the beginning.’ Ramon was delighted though his voice gave no hint. He could not have scripted things better. Clearly they had risen to his bait.

  ‘That’s true,’ said Milos. ‘But you often say one thing and mean precisely the opposite, no?’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘You do and you know you do. But enough! It’s time to just top up our glasses and let you get back to your story. Now, where are you going to take us today?’

  ‘To Sydney airport to meet a man you probably feel you already know. His name is Eduardo Gallegos. Yes, I think you will recognise this man.’

  ‘Intriguing. Will you find time to tell us about the boy Roberto?’

  ‘Perhaps. I suggest we enjoy lunch. Signal Gancio so that he can tell us what delights he has in store.’

  All in all, thought Ramon, the lunch had begun perfectly.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Eduardo arrived at Sydney airport on January 13, 1978, on a Qantas flight from Europe, relieved to have passed through immigration without hitch. He was now officially a resident of Australia, a new country with no burden of history to speak of, and a beckoning future.

  He arrived with enough money to buy a small printing company needing only an infusion of capital, and the single-minded hunger of ambition. He also bought an apartment in a tower block, on the slopes of Rose Bay.

  The two-bedroom layout was conventional, and the kitchen, bathroom and laundry were functional. The apartment was neither big enough to be large, nor small enough to imprison. Its single, overwhelming feature was its view. True, the aspect did not take in the Opera House or the Harbour Bridge, but these are mere adornments, jewels about the neck of the most beautiful harbour in the world. The view filled every centimetre of Eduardo’s plate glass windows.

  ‘Unsurpassed views of harbour to M
anly,’ said the estate agent’s flyer, which was, for once, faultlessly accurate.

  Eduardo was pleased with his new home, his eyrie as he liked to call it, and he was pleased with the potential of the company he had bought. But Eduardo was especially pleased with his adopted country. He loved the climate, and the easy-going attitude of the Australians. He thought they were the most likeable and commercially vulnerable people he had ever encountered—rather like Americans who hadn’t lost their innocence and, at the same time, also rather British. This appealed to him, this expatriot porteño. Porteños have often been described as Italians who speak Spanish but think they’re English. Eduardo liked to think he had a bit of the English in him.

  On all counts, Eduardo should have been well-satisfied with the change in his life. But only amnesiacs can rule a line across their lives and deny all that has gone before.

  In the stillness between the close of eyes and sleep, thoughts from his past returned unbidden to prick and twist and torment him. When sleep came, it would often bring Rosa.

  He was in prison, along with hundreds of other victims of the regime. They stood in a line, pressed up against a stone wall. Men in bloody aprons waited behind marble slabs. The floor was awash with blood, and the drains were blocked with human organs. Rosa and Carlos walked along in front of the line selecting prisoners for execution. They were dragged to the marble slabs and disembowelled while their screams still rang from their throats.

  He came to understand that Rosa held the power of life and death. She decided who would die, and who would be set free. He did not know why Rosa had been chosen for this job but suspected she had come to an arrangement with Carlos. She had condemned herself to a living hell in order to set free those she loved.

  He watched her as she walked slowly towards him choosing her victims. She always bypassed Victor, Roberto and the girl Lydia. She freed six others he half recognised before she came to him. Then she would stand in front of him. Slowly she would raise her hand, and her unwavering finger would point at him. Eduardo would feel the arms grab him, arms that would drag him away to his death. He would scream and beg, but she was deaf to his voice. She never looked back.

  He would wake up as they laid him on the marble slab, his sweat drenching the bed. Sometimes he would get up and lose himself in the distraction of late night television, with a large glass of whisky for company. Given time, he knew, the thoughts would fade and come no more. Given time.

  The takeover of Leichhardt Printing was not the immediate success Eduardo had expected. Indeed, business took a sudden downturn. Quotes they would normally expect to win, went elsewhere. Clients who had been loyal for years sought alternatives. Presses lay idle, and those men with jobs dragged them out, and tried to make them fill the hours of their day.

  Eduardo had been a fool. He readily conceded this. He had overestimated his ability and underestimated the task. He had not done his homework, had not taken the trouble to find out how either the city or the industry worked. He had made assumptions based on experiences in another country, in another life. They were mistakes his father would not have made.

  When he purchased the business he did not feel it necessary to retain the services of the previous owners. In truth, he could not wait to get them out of the door. He made them agree to a no-compete clause, then sent them on their way.

  That was his biggest mistake. The previous owners were brothers who had started the business and had built it up through the strength of their contacts. When the bond of mateship was severed, obligations ceased.

  Eduardo also fired the foreman, a man who had worked with the company for more than thirty years and was hostile to change. Yet he knew every machine as intimately as other men know their mistresses. And he knew every job for every client that went through the shop. He was the man clients turned to when they needed priority or some other favour. He was the one they trusted to solve the thousands of problems that attach themselves to print jobs like ink to a page.

  Eduardo had no choice but to dismiss him because he was an obstacle to the changes Eduardo needed to make. Eduardo wanted new blood, but only a fool fires without a replacement in the wings. And he had been foolish.

  He moved desperately to cover his errors. He wined and dined his way through the client list. But promises aren’t bankable, and old bridges not easy to rebuild. He courted his plate-makers and the people who made his separations. Their fortunes, he reasoned, would rise or fall with his. But at the time, demand outstripped supply. They still made the plates and separations, but now they made them for his competitors. Their suggestion, meant kindly, for they had no dislike of this personable Argentinian, was to replace the man he’d fired with someone similar, poached from another printing company. That’s how it worked, they said. People didn’t lose their jobs, they simply changed desks. And took a salary increase along the way for the inconvenience.

  The inertia in the industry began to wear Eduardo down. He needed a new entry point, a service nobody else offered, but was at a loss to know what it might be.

  With little to do in the office, he began to walk the streets looking for ideas. He was taken aback by the number of book shops and newsagents and began to count them. Then he began counting the titles of the magazines that crowded the racks, vying for space.

  He had come from a country with a voracious appetite for magazines. The eleven million people of Buenos Aires could enjoy reading a phone book, if nothing else was available. Yet it seemed to Eduardo that the habits of his compatriots paled before the avid consumption of the Australians.

  There were magazines on every conceivable subject of interest. Not one per subject, but competing titles, each helping to create a market and their own niche within it. He flicked through the magazines with mounting excitement. There were a few skinny publications, but most were plump and padded with glossy advertisements.

  He bought women’s magazines, men’s magazines, cooking, gardening, sporting, electronic, computer and automotive magazines. He took them all home and pored over them. The most attractive pages were those that carried advertisements. Their layout was more adventurous, the thoughts more challenging and the use of type more tasteful and creative. Considerable amounts of money had been spent on their production and that fact was not lost on Eduardo.

  He made a number of decisions that night, while the Manly ferries plied back and forth outside his plate glass windows.

  Leichhardt Printing would change direction. He would still handle the institutional business and the packaging, but the company would now shift its focus to serving advertising agencies and, later perhaps, to publishing magazines.

  He renamed his company the Hot Ink Press. He changed his hiring strategy. Instead of searching the printing industry for rising stars he now thought it incapable of producing, he turned his attention to advertising agencies. He wanted a man his potential customers would respect, who understood their needs and who had the courage to give up a secure job for the uncertain opportunities with an unknown Argentinian.

  After more wining and dining, he unearthed one name that commanded both respect and genuine affection.

  Phil Breedlaw was production manager of a multinational agency, and was responsible for all print production from artwork on. He was one of a proud but strangely masochistic band, who submitted their technical skills to the whim of art directors half their age. These art directors often had only a speculative idea of the result they wanted, and no idea at all about how to get it. That Phil was liked and respected by these high flyers with their fey talents was a tribute to his easy-going nature, and the long thankless hours he was prepared to put in.

  When Eduardo finally convinced Phil to come and have a chat with him, his first reaction was one of disappointment. Eduardo was expecting a dynamo, but instead saw a tall gangling man in his late forties, wearing trousers that suggested prior ownership by someone considerably shorter. His hands and feet were disconcertingly large, and his haircut could only have pleased a ser
geant major.

  Eduardo tried hard to hide his dismay and disappointment. He reacted by being overly polite and considerate. But looks can deceive and hide depths that are not initially apparent. Eduardo found himself being interviewed. Thoughts he’d intended to keep to himself were dragged out for inspection and analysis. He found his ideas being enlarged and refined, and his elaborate courtesies gave way to excited discussion.

  In years to come, they would debate whether Eduardo found the man he was looking for, or Phil the company. If marriages can be made in heaven then perhaps partnerships can as well, for that is how it seemed.

  Through Phil’s contacts, Hot Ink Press began to flourish. Phil knew where the money was and encouraged Eduardo to invest in the new computer technology and set up an art studio. He worked tirelessly and Eduardo would later concede that it was Phil who saved the business.

  They offered advertising agencies quality and convenience and, most precious of all in an industry that always struggled to meet deadlines, they offered speed. The type and art studio worked around the clock in shifts. The roughs the agencies sent them by evening courier were returned fully comped by morning, always immaculately mounted and framed. They charged a fearsome price for these services, but agencies paid and paid willingly, as Phil had known they would.

  Hot Ink Press became trendy and trendy people sought out Eduardo. They entertained him lavishly and he entertained them in turn. That was how he met Anders Peterson, creative director of one of the biggest agencies in town. Ridiculously good looking and ridiculously overpaid, Anders was almost half as talented as his personal PR machine made him out to be.

  Meeting Anders was a direct consequence of Eduardo’s decision to focus on advertising agencies. He understood clearly what a friendship with Anders could do for his business. But he could not begin to imagine the impact this man would have on his life, or how he would come to loathe him and blame him for the events that later took place. Eduardo did not know it, but he had set his course towards the point at which destiny turns and mocks those foolish enough to believe they are in control.