Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  As they near the hut, they will pause again, crouching down, observing the dark bulk of the construction above them, listening to the clatter of the water on the roof. And now the adrenaline will start to flow in their veins, and the smallest and youngest of them will be overwhelmed with a need to pee, and the one in charge, his big brother, will be most frightened of all, and so hiss urgent instructions to the others, hiding his fear in his commands. Perhaps the bule will make it easy for them, the boy in charge will be hoping: if he roars, or picks up an object to fight back, then it will be easy to cut him down, because then they will be threatened and have no choice. The big boy is hoping this is what will happen.

  And he, Harper, alone in his hut, perhaps he will be awake, thanks to the ghekko – or perhaps, just for once, he will be sound asleep.

  They will come through the window. The shutters will be easier to smash than the doors – it will make a racket, of course, even above the rain, but out here that won’t matter. It will be too late by then. There is only one window, and one door, and both lead out onto the same veranda. He will have nowhere to hide.

  Will they send boys? Harper wondered. If they want him dead, better to send an experienced man, one of the black-shirted militia who knows what he is doing, there were plenty of them around last time although, like the boys, they tended to work in groups. But boys would be easier to finesse if, back home, they were going to portray his death as part of the general disorder that was going on: that would be simplest for them. That was how he would do it, if he were them. There weren’t any shopping malls to loot and burn out here in the forest, but people back home thought of whole countries as violent once they had seen a few television pictures. Yes, poor Harper, wrong place, wrong time. Could happen to anyone. Word would get around the office, just like it always did. And I hear he’d got careless, the drinking, you know . . . At this, the person talking would lift a cup-shaped hand halfway up to his or her mouth and wobble it. Sending him back out there, after the problems he’d had, it was probably a mistake. He had had many of those conversations himself, over the years. Did you hear what happened to Joosten? They tied him to the wheel of his car and poured petrol over it. You don’t mess with those drugs lords, you know. Tales of bad things happening out in the field flattered those back home – look how dangerous our job can be, on occasion. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens. Joosten had been known to smoke a bit. Harper had seen him do it. There was almost always some basis to the rumours. That’s what they did in his line of work: took a thread of truth and wove a carpet out of it.

  Once, when they were drinking together back in Amsterdam, Joosten had let slip he had a safe house: a flat somewhere in a foreign city, he wouldn’t say where, not a country that their firm operated in. It was stocked with tinned food in case he needed to lie low for a while, and money and a false passport. Harper had left the bar that night shaking his head at Joosten’s paranoia.

  Beginning the letter to Francisca had convinced him that his calm during the night was due to more than exhaustion – he was sure, now, what was going to happen. What was it, to know you were going to die? We all carry that knowledge inside us, he thought: it is the one thing we know for certain.

  The black and green water in the rock pool – how cool it appeared. How good it would feel, in the rising humidity, to slip his old boots from his feet and dabble his toes in that water. Up in the hut, Kadek would have placed his breakfast – rice and a little sambal, some chicken maybe and some fruit – on the desk by the window. It would have a banana leaf laid over it to protect it. Kadek would have opened the shutters, to air the room, and folded back his crumpled bed sheets, smoothing them neatly. He should go back. There was the letter he really should write, even though it would be full of untruths and he might not get the chance to send it.

  He rose from the rock, stretched his arms upwards, performed a few loose movements from side to side with his hands on his hips, and turned to climb up the path.

  *

  It had already begun before Harper got there – that made it easier; it was well underway in fact. He was with Benni, that fat gangster. He liked his sweets, Benni, which was why he was down to three teeth, one front tooth and two incisors. Harper had spent months cultivating him when he got to Jakarta, on his first visit, back in ’65. Benni was said to have good connections with the military and like all the gangster-militiamen was fervently anti-Communist. The stallholders and shopkeepers in his area were terrified of him but whether or not he dined with Generals was another matter.

  They were in the small front area of a disused bar down a narrow alleyway in Pasar Senen. It was mid-afternoon and the sun blazed outside. There was a garage or storeroom of some sort out back where a man was being held. He had been there since dawn; a Chinese merchant who sold bolts of cloth from a shop next to the picture house on the edge of a nearby kampong, one of the cinemas the PKI had closed down recently because they showed decadent Western movies. Benni’s friends had lost money because of the cinema closures. The Chinese merchant had no proven connection with what had happened next door to his shop but he hadn’t paid his protection money in a month.

  Harper gathered this and other details as a group of them stood together in the front room of the bar – he and Benni had been lunching nearby when Benni’s driver had turned up and said they needed the boss. Six of Benni’s men plus the driver were gathered round and Harper got the gist, though they were all talking quickly and at once. The men were excited, competing for their boss’s attention. ‘BB! BB!’ they kept saying before they launched into their résumé of the story so far. The man was a Communist agitator who had been holding meetings in the back of his shop after closing hours, one of them seemed to be saying. Another mentioned a pile of chairs. The man was a liar, another interjected. He was worse than a nekolim . . . At the word nekolim, Benni clapped Harper on the shoulder and gave a gap-toothed grin and the other men looked at Harper for a moment until Harper gave a short bark of a laugh and suddenly the men were laughing too. Then they went back to talking at once. Most of them had been drinking arak all morning, Harper decided. They were his age, mid-twenties, or younger, apart from Benni who was maybe ten years older.

  Benni’s face became still as he listened further. In his meetings with Harper so far, he had been jovial and hospitable, giving him lunches and imported whisky, but when he was with his men, Benni liked to affect an air of seriousness. Then, without saying anything, he strode towards the back of the bar, his men following anxiously. Harper decided to wait where he was, wishing the bar was still operational. It was the first time Benni had involved him in his daily activities, which was good, a sign he was beginning to trust him – but he would hang back until he was called, let Benni initiate his level of involvement. He rubbed his palms together quickly and tried to ignore the small thumping in his chest.

  The others disappeared behind a door that clanged shut, leaving a metallic silence in its wake. Harper went to the front of the building, which was open to the alleyway, and looked down at the cement step to see if it was clean enough to sit on: it wasn’t. The alleyway was lined with drainage ditches that smelt of shit and piss.

  While he waited, a very young boy wearing nothing but a dirty T-shirt came and stood opposite him and stared, fearlessly, three fingers of one hand in his mouth and the other hand supporting his elbow, little round stomach protruding. Harper stared back at him. After a moment or two of appraisal, the boy turned and ran, kicking up dirt, shouting out something high-pitched and triumphant, as if he had fulfilled a dare.

  The door behind him clanged again. One of Benni’s men was standing at the back of the room, gesturing. ‘Mr BB says come.’

  When Harper entered the room, a filthy storage place with a low ceiling and one high, barred window, he saw in the dim light that there was a Chinese Indonesian seated on a low chair, with a table in front of him and his hands tied behind his back. It took Harper’s eyes a moment or two to adjust. It was hard to te
ll the man’s age. His face was covered in blood, and part of his scalp had been removed: what lay beneath was gleaming, wet and bare. His head was slumped a little to one side, as if he knew that he was going to be killed anyway, whatever he said – which was true – and had simply given up, resolved to endure what must be endured before his final moments.

  Benni was standing in one corner. ‘Come, you come stand next to me,’ he said to Harper in English. ‘Stand next to me, watch for a bit. He sees white man, he thinks someone. He thinks maybe, things maybe okay. Maybe he talk.’ Harper understood that his presence was, in effect, to extend the man’s torture. Perhaps they were hoping that by accident they had picked up a Commie after all. He might give them names. Nothing was as valuable as names, back then in ’65, as Jakarta simmered higher and higher, everyone was collecting names – they were a lot more valuable than the plummeting rupiah, which was worth so little now you had to walk around with a duffel bag of the stuff on your shoulder if you wanted to buy a beer. Even he, Harper, the man with access to the hardest currency of all authorised by his organisation, even he was dealing in names.

  The man had raised his head as Harper entered. He was staring at him, eyes wide in his bloodied face. Harper stared back. He tried to communicate that there was no hope, that the man should simply go back to wishing, waiting to die, make his peace with whatever god he might worship, say goodbye in his head to his family. The man lowered his head.

  This seemed to enrage one of Benni’s men, a small moustachioed type who stood nearest to the Chinese merchant and who was, Harper guessed, Benni’s number two in these matters. He snatched a pair of bloodied scissors from the table in front of the man and began to wave them in the man’s face and scream. It occurred to Harper that this was a test, that Benni had invited him in here to see how he would react – Benni was, after all, under the impression that he was recruiting Harper rather than the other way around. He glanced at the other men. They were all striking various poses around the room – two of them were mimicking the man with the moustache, staring at the merchant, teeth bared, faces gleaming with sweat. Two others were leaning against the wall, arms folded, staring, trying to look as hard as possible; one of the others was turning restlessly to and fro. The last one, the driver, who was about eighteen, Harper guessed, a tall boy with sloping shoulders, stood close to Harper and Benni, motionless but with his arms raised and his fists clenched, his gaze flitting this way and that, as if he were engaged in a high-speed race on a dangerous road and needed to be hyper-alert. Some of them had been drinking but they were all, all but Benni and himself, possessed by a kind of pseudo-sexual excitement. It came off them like a scent. Harper guessed these boys didn’t get much, if any. This kind of activity had to do instead.

  The man with the moustache carried on screaming, his face contorted, his voice high-pitched, and Harper found this screaming more unbearable than anything. Just die, Harper thought, looking at the merchant, just close down, make your thoughts leave your body. He wondered if it was possible to make yourself die, in extremis, to will it to happen but of course it wasn’t. Dying was a giving up of will. You could no more will it than levitate.

  He wanted to think about something other than the bloodied man in front of him so he thought about his own end. He would like to be able to see the sky, he thought. A perfect death would come in an arbour of some sort, with trees and flowers around, with a woman beside you who loved you and laid a cooling hand on your forehead. Your last thought as you slipped into unconsciousness would be that you were loved; the air full of sunshine, a blue and infinite sky.

  Not somewhere like here, alone but for the people who wanted you dead. Not this darkened room, with dank walls and a stinking dirt floor and a little grey light scarcely strong enough to illuminate the faces of the people who were about to kill you. Not like this. Not circling in water, either, unaware – how’s that for fresh air, Bud?

  The thought that he pushed to the back of his mind, as he stood and watched a man in pain and did nothing because his handler at the embassy had told him to win the trust of a filthy gangster who may or may not have good contacts with the military, was that he would never know what the look on his own face was like in the minutes before he died. He would never see it mirrored in a loved one. It felt like the most profound of premonitions, that there would be no witness to his departing, or no benign witness, but it was only three decades later, sitting on a rock above a green pool on a beautiful island, with a notebook on his lap, that he remembered it.

  That night, he slept better than any night since his arrival on the island. The irony of this did not escape him. He rose early and greeted Kadek, told him that he would like to go into town later, pick up a couple of things. The roads to town were so potted and poor that he could have strode along the river in the same time it would take them to bounce there together on Kadek’s moped, the weight of Harper on the back flattening the tyres.

  He told Kadek to finish his duties first and then get the moped and return for him later in the morning. It didn’t look like rain that day. When he stared at a man across a desk or in a prison cell, he could assess with cold accuracy not only whether that person was lying but whether later he would give up the truth. When he looked up at the sky, he knew what it was hiding too, what it would yield later that day.

  By the time they got to town, the sun was high. He got Kadek to drop him on the main street and told him to meet him there at five. He would walk around a bit to get his bearings, then find somewhere to drink coffee and watch the street, see what he could glean from a couple of hours observing who was in town. He would probably drink several coffees. Kadek brought a flask of hot water in the mornings so he could make it with powder but it didn’t really do the trick.

  *

  The main street of town was scarcely wide enough for two lanes of traffic and lined with cafes, overpriced jewellery and art shops for tourists alongside fruit and veg stalls and mini-markets; the Museum, the Palace, a Chinese restaurant that blared American rock. He spent two hours in a new, Euro-style place, jazz tinkling from speakers but barely audible above the noise from the street. He ordered a coffee and a cinnamon roll and, in an impulse he felt himself regretting even as he conceded to it, a packet of kretek cigarettes. The cigarettes came first, on a plate, the packet opened for him and propped up on its own lid, one cigarette helpfully extended and a frangipani blossom tucked in by its side. He smoked it slowly, waiting for his coffee and his roll, then closed the packet to discourage immediate consumption of another. He sipped the coffee, tore small pieces from the roll. It was sunny, the street was teeming; small trucks, tourist vans, locals on mopeds. Even the grandmothers drove mopeds these days. He had just ordered his second coffee when, right in front of him, a white municipal truck pulled out to go round a parked car and blocked the road. There followed a brief comedy of chaos as some moped drivers tried to circumvent the truck only to meet others trying to get round the other way. These things were always conducted with an orchestra of horn tooting and calling, much as the Italians did but without the undertone of aggression. He watched and, for a moment, the traffic jam made him miss Jakarta, then it was over and the cars and trucks and mopeds flowed again in their congested, casually dangerous way.

  It took a few moments for the line to clear. When it had, he saw that at the end of it was a low jeep that bumped past slowly – it was stuck behind the last moped in the build-up, a very old-looking machine with a woman and three children; a young girl on the back, a small boy standing on the foot panel in front and a baby strapped to the woman’s chest – and he had time to observe the four young men in the jeep. They were dressed a bit more smartly than the local men, in white shirts and loose pants. Their faces were not as rounded as the typically Balinese face, he thought: they were sharper. One of them sitting in the back caught his gaze briefly and returned it. The truck moved on.

  A very tiny, elderly woman with a tree-bark face approached the step below where he was sea
ted, holding a woven tray on which she was carrying twenty or so offerings. She gave him a single-toothed smile as she knelt to arrange one of the offerings on the ground, to appease the demons, the rice and flower petals in the little basket made of a stapled banana leaf. He returned her smile and tried not to think what he always thought when he saw locals of that age: what were you doing, back then? Where were you? Were you out in the middle of the night, joining the hunting parties in the rice fields? Or did you simply raise your hand to point at a neighbour’s house and whisper to the men in black shirts the single word that would slaughter the entire family asleep in there: gestapu? A young woman tourist in white shorts and a tight yellow vest stopped and watched the old woman as she placed three incense sticks at angles in the offering and lit them with a cigarette lighter. The young woman took a step back, respectfully, then lifted her camera to her face.

  A newspaper seller wandered past with piles of thin broadsheets over his arm. He stopped when he saw Harper and raised one but it was the International Herald Tribune. Harper shook his head. That wouldn’t exactly fill him in on what was going on in Jakarta. None of the local bars had televisions: how was he supposed to know what the latest was? Normally, he would check in with the Jakarta office or Amsterdam but he was officially taking a break. Taking a break, so far, meant being kept in the dark.

  Smoking hard and drinking coffee was making him feel both hazy and alert: the contradiction was pleasant. There was a certain merit in doing these things infrequently. He wanted a whisky but he hadn’t touched a drop since that disastrous night in Jakarta a week ago, even though he had an unopened bottle at the hut. He had bought it for himself as a kind of test, which – so far – he had passed. He wanted it now, though. That’s okay, he thought. Acknowledge to yourself that you want it, and then move on.