Captiva df-4

by Randy Wayne White

  It is one of the great ironies of Indonesia that its Islamic communities are brutally strict about some laws, yet totally indifferent to others. Were I found guilty of stealing in Medan, my left hand would be chopped off. Were I caught with narcotics in my possession, I would be condemned to some hellhole prison for a year or more, then shot. No appeals considered, no questions asked, no concessions offered even to a well-moneyed American. But for a few thousand rupiah—the equivalent of about two dollars— I could purchase the innocence of any wandering child, and the local cops would turn their backs.

  The few tourists who came to Sumatra—there weren't many—came for the lively sex trade. The only other draw was the timber trade. The Japanese, I knew, were logging the rain forests day and night. The industry had attracted a sizable enclave of Japanese—which explained the niche market Raymond Tullock had found for his mullet roe. That Sumatra was sexually lawless also explained the Japanese's need for it.

  I told Rengat, "No children today, thanks."

  Before he dropped me at my hotel, I had Rengat drive me through town and out toward the port of Belawan. It took me more than an hour of roaming around the docks, using Rengat as an interpreter, to find the boat I was to meet. It was a small brown-sailed junk made of red teak. The junk had a dragon's head carved into the bow, and golden Chinese characters on the stern. Beneath the characters was a word in English: Rangoon.

  The captain of the vessel was a dour little man whose teeth were black from chewing betel nuts. He made a show of being angry at me. I was days late! He was now off schedule! Which was all bullshit—they had only just arrived, according to the junk's customs sheet, and had to stay in Sumatra for at least several days, as we both well knew. But I palmed him several twenties, and three evenly ripped halves of hundred-dollar bills to make him happy.

  At customs, I showed the inspector one of my three false passports. I also showed him my international collector's permit. All the embossed lettering and stamps seemed to impress him. So did the innocuous ten-dollar bill I slipped him. The customs inspector opened the small Styrofoam box I had taken from the junk. Inside were three frozen ox-eyed tarpon, a species that is found only in Asia and is very common around the river mouths of Burma. To an American biologist such as myself, they were rare creatures indeed.

  I raised my eyebrows at the inspector to illustrate my question, then made a sawing motion with my hand. Did he want me to cut the fish open?

  The man shook his head, already bored with me, and waved me through.

  I carried my package back to the little car and got in beside Rengat. As we neared the city, I suggested he make a quick stop at his home so that I might meet his wife and children. Rengat was reluctant. I pressed the issue, telling him I wanted to make small gifts of money to his children.

  Ultimately, greed got the best of him. His tiny block house was just off a side street named Madong Lubis. I bowed to Rengat's wife and dipped a cup of kava from the wooden bowl in the tiny living room. In Asia, loud slurping is the sound of polite approval. I patted Rengat s children and gave them crisp greenbacks. As I held the bills out, only I seemed to notice that my hands were shaking.

  Once we were back in the car, Rengat was not so talkative, and he seemed less eager for me to approve of him. Familiarity diminishes authority while increasing dependency. My visit had accomplished both. As he drove me to my hotel, I was aware that Rengat was aware that the price of any sort of betrayal had increased exponentially.

  I now knew where the man lived.

  A sealed note from Havildar apologized for his absence and told me that Raymond Tullock was staying at the H otel Tiara, third floor, room 217.

  The strange numbering system, I knew, was a holdover from the old Dutch colonial days when Sumatra was one of the thriving dark corners of the rubber trade.

  The Hotel Tiara was the best hotel in Medan—which is to say that it was about as plush, but not as clean, as the average Motel 6. It was a tall, squarish salmon-colored building on busy, potholed Cut Mutiah Street. Small men with rickshaws and pedicabs stood in a line outside the hotel, waiting for fares.

  The room Havildar had arranged for me was opposite the Hotel Tiara and down less than a block. It was a native place named Selamat Sian— "Good day!" in Indonesian. The little rooming house was as dark and narrow-staired as a New York tenement building. It smelled of curry and rotting durian fruit and Indonesian cigarettes. My room overlooked the street, so I could watch Tullock coming and going.

  Havildar's note also told me that I should not trust Rengat, but not to fear him either. The note included the names I needed of a few local men, and it concluded by reminding me that Havildar and I still had unfinished business on the nearby island of Timor. In 1975, the Indonesian government had staged a brutal military takeover of East Timor. Military rule there—enforced by Indonesian death squads—continues even today.

  Years ago, I had used Sumatra as a staging area for a surveillance operation that had accomplished absolutely nothing but earn me the friendship of the little Gurkha sergeant. I was sorry about Havildar's father, but I wished to hell Havildar were still in Medan, and not working his way up to his native village in the Himalayas. It did more than change my plan. I would now have to completely abandon certain elements of it.

  There was one thing I didn't want to do, couldn't do: spend much time in Medan. It was possible that the Indonesian government had learned about my earlier work. If I was caught—particularly with three false passports in my possession—I would be summarily jailed. Maybe the American Embassy in Jakarta would be notified, but that was unlikely. A more probable scenario was that I would be locked anonymously away until an appropriate time when I might be used as a bargaining tool. If that opportunity never materialized—I could think of no reason that it would—then I would be left to die in the local prison.

  I had once driven past that prison—the Simpang Alas it was called, named for a local river. Alas Prison was a monstrous old fortress of rotting cement and concertina wire built north of town. It had reminded me of Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi, because the outside walls were painted the same damp, mustard-yellow color. Its few windows were as black and narrow as gunports; the yellow walls were high. Two elements dominated the prison grounds: the silence . . . and the smell. Simpang Alas possessed the eerie silence of an abandoned city; the kind of silence that fills the void after someone has abruptly ceased screaming. The wind that blew over the prison carried the defecant odors of humans who have been reduced to cave animals. That smell was the stench of nightmares.

  Even local travelers who passed Simpang Alas averted their eyes, as if a dark vacuum radiated out beyond the prison walls and to look upon it put them at risk of being sucked into that darkness.

  What I needed to do was hit Raymond Tullock quickly, then get the hell out. I would have preferred anything to even a year in Simpang Alas—a firing squad, a knife . . . anything.

  But with Havildar gone, it would not be so easy.

  For three straight days, I watched Tullock from my window, or tagged along after him in a car, with Rengat driving. I watched him and made cryptic notes.

  He was never hard to find. In the alleyways of Sumatra, a tall, blond American stands out in any crowd.

  Tullock had three Japanese business associates. The four of them spent two mornings at the huge fish market in Belawan, not far from the port where I had met the junk days earlier. They also spent a day traveling around the foothills of the western mountains. I got the impression that Tullock was thinking about expanding into the timber business. Also got the impression that he was looking for an estate to buy or rent.

  In Indonesia, a man with a monthly income of a couple thousand U.S. dollars could live like a sultan. Maids, gardeners, a chauffeur, cooks, and all the wives and mistresses he wanted.

  I wondered if Tullock was afraid of the murder charge that might await him back in the states. He had cleaned out his bank accounts. So maybe that had been his plan all along. Hann
ah had made it plain that he would never have her, so why go back?

  I also wondered if Tullock, through phone calls back to the States, had discovered that he had killed Hannah, not me.

  I found it oddly irritating that I did not know.

  Tullock was a punctual man of habit. Each day he returned to his hotel just after five and drank bottled Pellegrino water on the patio that overlooked the hotel garden. He would sit there in his catalogue-new safari clothes and listen to the eerie wail of the muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayer. Would sit there as the whole city came to a stop around him; as passersby threw prayer carpets onto the dirt walkways and bowed toward Mecca. He would continue to sip water and write in his ledger book, indifferent to it all. Then Tullock would return to his room and reappear an hour later, right at dusk, and go for a jog. His route was always the same: down the crowded streets, then north along the Deli River. His route followed dirt footpaths that wound through several patches of park that were as dark and wooded as jungle.

  My original plan was to have Havildar sneak into Tullock's room while he was out. It would have been so simple, so damn easy. I could have chosen any time I wanted to confront Tullock—I wanted to confront him—then left the rest to Havildar and the men he had named in his note.

  That wouldn't work now. Rengat couldn't be trusted, and like Tullock, I stood out in a crowd. People would notice me in his hotel. People would notice me on his floor.

  I couldn't risk that... yet it seemed mad to proceed without knowing what was in the man's room.

  I could hear Tomlinson's voice saying, I take it on faith, man. On faith. Could hear Hannah's voice saying, I knew . . . I just knew.

  But I took little on faith, and I knew nothing instinctively.

  What I did know was that revenge included risk, and risk had a price.

  One night, I stood in my room and looked at myself in the flaked mirror that was nailed to the wall. I was a little drunk—I'd had a couple of liters of Tiger beer. In the mirror was the face of a stranger. It was like standing behind a wall, looking through a two-way mirror. If I moved my mouth, the stranger moved his mouth. If I rubbed a hand over the beard stubble on my chin, the stranger did the same. But the stranger's eyes were not my eyes. His were predator-bright. Mine felt bleary. It was as if the stranger were mocking me: So just snatch the guy, bag him, and kill him!

  It seemed so easy to the stranger; everything clear-cut and neatly defined. And it would have been easy: Follow Tullock out on one of his runs, then hide along the river, in the trees. Crouch there watching the great hornbill birds fly over, their wings creaking; watch the giant fruit bats drop down out of the trees and cup the darkness with their five-foot wing spans. Wait for Tullock to jog back . . . then take him.

  It was so easy that, each day at dusk, as I watched Tullock trot off, I had to fight the temptation ... a temptation so strong that I found myself procrastinating, getting the man's patterns down for no other reason than to underline the simplicity of that stranger's simple solution.

  Yet I didn't want it to end that way. Not for Raymond Tullock. More important, not for me.

  I decided to proceed with a variation of my original plan. I had taken risks before—not many, but a few. Now, at least, it seemed that I had much less to lose. . . .

  Friday is a Muslim holy day, so I spent it transferring my belongings into two canvas duffel bags that I had purchased at the Central Market which was just off Sutomo Street.

  Into my old bags—which included my favorite Loomis travel rod satchel—I placed rags and chunks of wood that I had pilfered from the back of my boarding house. When the bags looked and felt about right, I used duct tape to seal them tight.

  Then I dressed myself in a favorite pair of baggy Egyptian cotton slacks; the kind with the big cargo pockets. Into the right pocket, I stuffed a big bandanna and the opaque green glass orb I had taken from Hannah's house.

  The little ball had a nice weight to it. It was granite-smooth except for the ingenious flanged stopper.

  I spent half an hour practicing, but just couldn't seem to get it right. My hands were too big, my fingers too long and blunt. Once upon a time I had spent a deadly boring week in a boat off the coast of Cambodia. One of my companions had three small baggies filled with sand, and he had tried to teach me to juggle. I never did get it. My hands are fine for focusing a microscope, or for using a scalpel, but they are not clever in a way that I now needed.

  Once I almost dropped the glass ball, and I thought: You're insane to try this without Havildar's help.

  But I ignored the small, destructive internal voice. Blotted out the images of me squatting in some cell in Simpang Alas Prison. I kept at it. Kept practicing. Tried to picture the way it would be: Me in the room, Raymond Tullock in the room, plus two, maybe three others. I had to point at something—anything to shift their attention—then draw the bandanna out of my pocket smoothly, very, very smoothly. . . .

  When I thought I had it pretty good, I played around with my portable shortwave radio, then took up the bandanna again and practiced for another half an hour. I wanted to embed the move into the muscle memory; wanted to be able to do it mechanically, like it was second nature, without having to think.

  In the early evening, while the city's bullhorns told the faithful that it was time to bow to Mecca, I decided that I had had enough. I put everything away, changed into different clothes. Then I took my three ox-eyed tarpon into the bathroom to dissect.

  Later that night, I ate satay beef and rice, sitting across a restaurant table from Rengat. I told him that I would be leaving Medan the next evening. I told him to come by my boarding house promptly at sunset, so that he could take my luggage to Polonia Airport. I told him that because of a business engagement, I would arrive separately by private cab and might be a little late.

  I watched the little man's eyes shift around as he projected great sadness that I had to leave Sumatra so soon. "Has something happened to displease you?" he asked.

  I handed Rengat my Garuda Airline ticket so that he could check my luggage. "I'm afraid something very bad has happened," I told him. "I've been robbed."

  When Raymond Tullock returned from his run the next evening, two Indonesian policemen and I were standing in the hallway, outside his room, waiting on him. For days, I had been looking forward to this moment; had anticipated, with great pleasure, the shock that seeing me would cause the man . . . had anticipated, with greater pleasure, the terror that would drain his face pale.

  So I stood there, arms folded, a uniformed cop on either side of me. I could hear the squeak-squeaking of Tullock's rubber-soled shoes as he came up the linoleum steps, two at a time. Could see his head and shoulders come into view, and I fixed my eyes on his face. As Tullock got to the top of the stairs, he hesitated when he saw us. I watched closely as his eyes registered consternation and minor surprise; but nothing that communicated shock, nothing close to terror.

  Not a good reaction. . . .

  He paused at the top of the stairs, collecting himself. He was wearing black spandex beneath burgundy running shorts. The rubber skin of his sweat pullover was shiny but dry—a vaguely reptilian touch. Tullock stared at me for a moment . . . then at the two cops . . . then back to me. Favored me with a thin, nervous smile before he said, "Well, well—long time no see. The name's Ford, isn't it? How's our girl Hannah doing, Ford?"

  At least he doesn't know.

  I said, "My girl Hannah is just fine. Me, too. We're all just fine."

  Which seemed to cause him momentary discomfort. But he recovered quickly, showing me he didn't much care. Said, "Always good to see another American in these Third World countries," as he continued down the hall toward us. Then: "Is it true? I hear you've been robbed."

  I thought: Rengat, you son of a bitch!

  Tullock brushed past me just close enough so that his shoulder collided with mine—a gesture designed to stake out territory—and he produced a key, then swung his door wide. "You're welcome
to have a seat while I change, gentlemen. But I'm afraid I can't give you much time. I have a dinner appointment in less than an hour." Turned his head to give me a private, searing look. "So let's make it quick."

  In Indonesia, law enforcement has an informal aspect. Visitors or individual citizens can seek out the help of specific cops. Havildar had given me the names of two who spoke English. One was Lieutenant Suradi, the other was Officer Prajurit. Both were small, dark men who wore navy-blue slacks and shirts that were brightened with red trim. Because I had used Havildar's name, they had come with me to the Hotel Tiara willingly enough—not that I could expect any favors from them. Already I could sense that Tullock's self-assurance had made Lieutenant Suradi, for one, dubious.

  "This a very serious charge, sahr," he said to me as we entered the room. "You must be certain. You not very certain, sahr, maybe this man ask we arrest you!" Said it loud enough for Tullock to hear, letting him know that he was not taking sides in this squabble between two Americans.

  Tullock was stripping off the rubber pullover, handling himself pretty well. Showing just the right mix of tolerance and indignation. "It's a damn serious charge, Ford. If you've never been to Indonesia before, maybe you don't know, but—over here?—they cut a man's hand off for stealing."

  I gave a soft whistle, trying to play it just as cool. "Maybe you can get the doctors to fix you up with a hook, Ray. A man with your hobbies wouldn't want to get caught shorthanded."

  "Oh? What hobbies are those?"

  "Wires and things. Timers? Things that can blow up in your face."

  Tullock was toweling himself down. Gave me a pained expression— Fuck you—before saying to Suradi, "I suppose you're here to search my room."

  "Yes. If this man want."

  "You mind showing me the search warrant?"

  Suradi was puzzled for a moment. "Oh! No need warrant. This man want, we search."

  I got the impression that Tullock didn't care if we searched his room or not; was just playing a role. I wondered what kind of deal Rengat had worked with him. The little bastard had picked up my luggage right on time. Had probably reasoned that since I was flying out tonight, he no longer had a cause to fear me. So why not make some extra money? Could picture him telling Tullock, "All week, this big man follow you! You pay, I tell you more!"