Java Spider

by Geoffrey Archer

  Bruton moved off to work the crowd, leaving Maxwell to hover. For a while he kept his eye on Sumoto and wondered. Odd to have voiced his concerns so directly. Javans talked in circles normally.

  He looked around the reception room, musing about how much wealth this gathering was accountable for. Musing too about how, one way or another, most of the wealth would have derived from institutionalised corruption.

  ‘Mr Maxwell …’

  A voice at his side suddenly, which shook him from his thoughts.

  ‘Brigadier! Well met, sir!’

  It was Effendi, the police intelligence chief who’d given him the ‘evidence’ of Bowen’s departure to Singapore. Dressed in full uniform, he was short of stature with a round, dark-skinned face and a thin, black moustache.

  ‘Hardly expected to see you here.’

  An embarrassed laugh. ‘My brother,’ Effendi explained, teeth gleaming, ‘he is a director of JAVAIR.’

  Say no more, thought Maxwell. Fingers in pies.

  ‘I see you talk with General Sumoto,’ Effendi commented. ‘You think he interesting?’

  ‘Well yes. In that he believes it is the Kutuans who kidnapped Stephen Bowen – with outside help.’ Effendi said nothing. ‘You don’t agree?’

  ‘No opinion. Because no evidence,’ the brigadier answered formally.

  And Sumoto doesn’t have any either, Maxwell understood him to mean.

  ‘You like the general?’ Maxwell queried, tilting his head to Sumoto who stood less than five metres from them.

  ‘He important man,’ Effendi replied, deflecting the question. His eyes gleamed mischievously. ‘But he have a special name. Know what we call him?’

  ‘No. A nickname, you mean?’

  ‘Laba-laba! You know what that mean? Spider. People call him spider, because he always spinning a web …’

  They both glanced at Sumoto, who was talking conspiratorially with two others, their heads close together.

  ‘I see what you mean,’ Maxwell smiled.

  ‘He like to have people in his power,’ Effendi added, embarrassed suddenly by his own openness with a foreigner.

  ‘The succession, you mean? For when the president goes?’

  Effendi nodded. ‘Of course. Everybody afraid what will happen then. Many people like Sumoto want to fix things so it right for themselves when the time come …’

  Maxwell arched his eyebrows, surprised at such unaccustomed frankness.

  ‘Why … why do you tell me this?’ he asked casually.

  Effendi smiled enigmatically. ‘Because in Java our spiders are dangerous.’ He made to move away. ‘Best you watch out.’

  ‘I’m grateful for the advice,’ Maxwell murmured. ‘But there’s something else I wanted to ask you about. Singapore.’

  Effendi’s face became a mask again, then he said, ‘I know. They say your minister not arrive there, but …’ He looked genuinely mystified. ‘But our evidence – it say he definitely leave Jakarta for Singapore. If we find different, then of course I will tell you.’

  Maxwell nodded. If we find different … The enquiry was ongoing at least, despite official Indonesian insistence the kidnap was nothing to do with them.

  ‘One final question, brigadier,’ Maxwell added. ‘We suspect Stephen Bowen might have been travelling with a woman. He was friendly – at an official level of course – with Miss Sakidin. From the Ministry of Foreign Affairs …’

  Effendi’s eyes were like glass.

  ‘We already interview every official who look after him when he here,’ he admitted softly. ‘And Nona Sakidin – I speak with her myself this afternoon.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Yes. And she confirm what airport police already tell me. Confirm Mr Bowen fly to Singapore on Wednesday morning.’

  ‘Confirm? What d’you mean …?’

  ‘Well … Nona Sakidin – she the person who take him to airport.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes. Not official, understand. Just as friend …’ Effendi gazed at him unblinking.

  ‘A little personal touch … I understand,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘But … but did she say where Bowen was going? Did she say why he was heading for Singapore?’

  ‘On way home to England. That what she say. She think he going home.’

  No, thought Maxwell. Didn’t add up. The woman was lying. Or somebody was.

  It was imperative now that he spoke to her himself.

  Piri – capital of Kutu

  23.40 hrs

  The crescent moon shone silver through a mesh of cloud, its long reflection in the ocean blurred by the silhouettes of coconut palms. The Indonesian soldier at the wheel of the truck would have preferred the moon to be full so he could have driven without lights. Safer that way.

  Bullets weren’t the danger here in town. The OKP kept their meagre stock of guns up in the hills. Rocks were the weapons in the dusty streets of Piri, the island’s capital. The helmeted snatch squad he was transporting, crammed behind him in the open back of the truck, was a sitting target.

  The convoy followed the curve of the coastal road, skirting the Poteng kampung where the troublemakers lived. The military’s plan was to leave the town along the coast then curve inland and re-enter Poteng from the west, hoping to catch the ones they were after by surprise.

  The thick tyres purred on the tarmac, the first truck followed by three more. The streets of Piri were deserted. Had been since nine o’clock. There was no official curfew in the town, but there didn’t need to be. Fear kept people in their homes once night set in.

  The soldiers in the truck were not from Kutu. Javans, Sumatrans, Balinese. Conscripts mostly. Night was the environment they’d come to know best. Rested and alert themselves after a day of sleep, they hoped their victims would be dulled by exhaustion. They called this Operasi Kalong – Operation of the Bats.

  The evening just ended had been more troublesome than most. When word got round that the kidnap of a foreigner had pushed the Kutuan struggle into the headlines around the world, riots had broken out all over town.

  Streets barricaded by rocks and burning tyres, bottles smashed under the wheels of army jeeps. Stones and gibes from children who scampered down alleys before they could be caught and beaten. A time of excitement for the Kutuans. A time of tension and fear for the soldiers.

  Behind the town rose the steep foothills of the great, rumbling volcano that dominated the island’s geographic heart and whose spirit watched over the souls of its people. Black shadows against a near-black sky. It was up there in those foothills that the huge earth-swallowing machines of the Kutu Mining Consortium KUTUMIN were going to rip off the island’s vegetation to expose the gold and copper-bearing rock beneath. To the men of Kutu it was a rape of holy land.

  Dr Junus Bawi lay motionless on the wood-framed bed, listening to the even breathing beside him of his wife Dana. Beyond her soft panting, his ears were tuned for the more distant sound of diesels and banging tail-boards that would tell him the raids had begun. In the grid of streets that made up the district of Poteng there would be many like him, waiting sleeplessly to be taken for interrogation.

  His small, three-room, breeze-block house was nowadays devoid of ornament, the shelves in the day-room bare of books. Too many times he and his family had seen the things they valued smashed and burned by the animals ABRI sent to intimidate them. Better now to possess little and to keep what they treasured in their heads and their hearts.

  The door to the bedroom was open to let the air circulate. Humidity was rising. The wet season that had barely begun would peak at the end of the year with cyclones and floods.

  In the next room lay their child. Junus had told Dana to keep the curly-haired, eleven-year-old boy indoors that evening, fearing the soldiers might shoot rioters like they had in the past.

  News about the kidnap had broken in the late afternoon. Bawi had been at the university marking students’ work when a colleague burst in with a radio tuned to the BBC. In a breat
hless silence they’d listened to the report of the kidnap of a man whose name they’d never heard.

  Bawi had been gripped by a deep foreboding. An act of violence had been committed against a foreigner in the name of the people he represented – and he knew nothing about it. To him it could mean only one thing; the split in the Resistance between himself and Soleman Kakadi had widened to a chasm.

  Dr Junus Bawi was professor of languages at Kutu’s small university, continuing to teach the island’s unique Melanesian dialect despite Jakarta’s wish to replace it with Bahasa Indonesia. Kutu had been absorbed late into the Indonesian archipelago, after being retained by its European colonisers for twenty years longer than the rest of the old East Indies. Keeping the island’s young aware of their culture was the modest, public face of his resistance to Jakarta’s rule and exploitation. His involvement with the protest movement was more clandestine.

  Suddenly there was a distant clatter of sticks against cooking pots. The sentries had seen the approaching trucks. Bawi’s limbs tensed.

  His instinct as always was to run, to hide, to avoid the gut-churning terror of arrest. But there was nowhere to go. If he wasn’t at home when they came, they would beat his wife to make her say where he was. And if he were found in some other house his hosts would pay the price as well as him. Fleeing to the hills was the last resort, but to him that meant failure. Success was to stay in Piri, keeping the flames of resistance alive in the minds of the young.

  He sat up on the bed. Dana heard him, heard the clatter outside, and whimpered like a frightened animal. Bawi swung his feet to the floor. Wearing undershorts, he covered his skinny torso with a white shirt then stepped into thin cotton trousers. Neither spoke.

  Dana was shorter than her husband. He watched her remove the flower-patterned night slip, hook a brassiere under her heavy breasts then reach behind to fasten it. Her waist and stomach were ribbed with flesh. She pulled a cotton T-shirt over her head, then looked into Obeth’s room.

  Tyres squealed at the junction twenty metres away. A tailboard banged down. Rubber soles crunched on the grit of the unmade road. Shouts and hammering at doors opposite. Maybe not him they were after this time. Bawi pushed on his heavy-framed spectacles and ran a comb through his straight, black hair.

  Women screamed as their sons were dragged from their beds. He heard the thud of a rifle butt, then silence. A heavy, measured step, outside. Approaching his door this time.

  A fist crashed on the thin panels. Bawi switched on the lights and opened up. Then his throat dried as he recognised the brute of an arresting officer.

  ‘You must come!’ Captain Sugeng’s voice was like a whiplash. Dana sobbed wretchedly as she recognised him. ‘You and the boy. Come.’

  ‘No!’ Bawi protested. ‘Not the child.’

  ‘Obeth was seen. Throwing rocks.’

  ‘No. You’re wrong. He was here. In the house!’

  Sugeng laughed, his thick lips parting to show rows of neat, small teeth. ‘You’re lying, professor. We know your boy. He was recognised.’

  The seams of the officer’s crisp uniform threatened to burst under the pressure of his muscular body. With a flap of his hand he waved two soldiers into the house.

  Bawi followed them to the boy’s room. Dana was already there. She threw herself across her son’s body but the soldiers slung her on the floor and grabbed the boy.

  ‘My son was here!’ Bawi insisted. ‘Leave him alone!’

  Obeth was dragged out by his hair and frogmarched to the trucks.

  ‘He’s a child,’ Bawi mouthed helplessly.

  ‘You too, professor …’ Sugeng’s voice mocked Bawi’s impotence.

  ‘Do you have a warrant?’ he asked, suddenly defiant.

  The answer was a shove in the back, a hand propelling him towards the lorry. A prod in the buttocks with a gun to encourage him on to the open platform. He looked back at his home. The door was closed again. Sugeng had gone inside.

  Bawi swallowed. A taste of sick in his throat. A month ago the same. After his release that time Dana’s silence had told him enough of what Sugeng had done to her. Asking for confirmation would have added to her shame. Since then, there’d been no intimacy between them.

  Bawi looked round for his son, but the boys were in another truck. About ten of them. He wanted to shout across to be brave, but willed the words instead. They didn’t usually harm kids that young, he reasoned. No burns or beatings. Just threats, to terrorise them. And he himself should be all right. Too well known to the outside world to be tortured. Amnesty would make easy capital with it.

  The diesels revved. The soldiers clambered on board. As they moved off, Bawi looked back. Just one jeep left. Outside his house. Three nervous soldiers guarding it with their guns. Waiting for their officer to finish with the prisoner’s wife.

  Bawi swallowed again. Salt tears this time.

  The Kadama interrogation centre was at the other end of Piri from Poteng, set back a hundred metres from the coast road to enhance its isolation. Three sides of a courtyard, the outward walls windowless and grey, peppered with ventilation grilles for the cells. Local people seldom hung around to hear the sounds of pain from within.

  The truck slowed and turned up the track. Four times in the past two years Bawi had been brought here.

  The soldiers ordered the prisoners down. As his legs touched the ground Bawi lost his balance and fell at a soldier’s feet. He waited for a kick but instead heard laughter. Some joke about licking boots. And arses.

  They stood in a queue before a desk, while a policeman wrote their names in a book. Police and army. No difference. All ABRI. All part of the same regime.

  His son was ahead of him in the line, the youngest and smallest of the boys. He knew most of the others. Had watched them grow up. Most were sixteen or seventeen. At eleven Obeth looked out of place and vulnerable. He’d never been involved in street trouble. Dana had seen to that.

  Dana … His stomach clenched at the thought of Sugeng’s vile hands on her.

  His turn for registration.

  ‘Dr Junus Bawi,’ he announced defiantly. ‘I want a lawyer with me when I’m questioned.’

  The policeman looked up, pained. There was always one like this.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he answered, carefully writing the name in capitals. ‘Lawyers only work in the day.’

  ‘Then my interrogation must wait until tomorrow …’

  The policeman shook his head and demanded that Junus hand over his watch.

  ‘Next!’

  Bawi was led up a staircase to the first floor. A long corridor stretched the length of one wing of the building. Cracked terracotta floor, rough plaster walls, bare bulbs every ten metres. As he walked where he was pushed, eyes staring fixedly ahead, he passed doors of iron bars, not daring to look in the cells. This wing was for men. The one across the courtyard for women.

  A hand on his shoulder. The guard pushed him into a cell then clanged the door shut. On the high ceiling a lamp shone brightly inside a metal grille. Worn tiles covered the floor, white gloss paint on concrete walls, four rattan mats aligned with the corners. On one a middle-aged man slept, knees pulled up to his chin. On the other a younger person sitting cross-legged, stared up at him.

  ‘Professor Bawi!’ the youth whispered hoarsely. ‘Don’t you know me?’

  Junus gave him a cursory glance.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I was a student. Three years ago. You remember?’

  ‘No. I have so many students …’ Junus kept his eyes on the floor. He knew what this was about.

  ‘They keep me here three days, but I tell them nothing,’ the youth whispered. ‘Bad …’

  Junus looked away.

  ‘I suppose for you, it is better you co-operate,’ the youth went on. ‘They know everything about you, so it is better not to lie. Am I right? They know you send supplies to the mountains. Everyone knows. All the students, even.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about
…’

  Junus lay down on a mat. No pillow or padding, but the discomfort was preferable to conversation with an oafish stool pigeon.

  He heard a whimper from the corridor and a door clanging. Someone returning from interrogation. Then the footsteps of the guards came closer, rubber soles squeaking on the tiles.

  The gate opened.

  ‘Bawi! You come.’

  Wasting no time, he thought. An urgency he’d not experienced before.

  They marched him to the far end of the corridor. A thick wooden door opened into the block that ran between the men’s and women’s wings. It was here the interrogations were done by the sick men from intel. From somewhere close he heard the dull thud of a beating.

  Junus’s courage failed him. He sensed suddenly that this time he too would be tortured. For a moment he lost control of his legs. The guards grabbed his arms and propelled him forward, his feet trailing on the ground.

  A door opened in front of them and a man was dragged out, the white of his shin bones showing through his bloodied skin.

  The soldiers pushed Bawi into a darkened room then closed the door. Pitch black. He felt himself swaying. He held his breath, knowing there’d be others in this room. But how many? And where?

  Suddenly he heard someone clearing his throat. Then a low chuckle.

  The light snapped on. A single floodlight on a stand pointed at him. Bawi shielded his eyes. He counted three pairs of legs, one in uniform green behind a table, the others in a darker cloth.

  ‘Dr Bawi …’

  Junus recognised the voice of Colonel Widodo, head of ABRI Military Intelligence.

  ‘Professor, you’re keeping us waiting …’

  Widodo had interviewed him before. He knew the man’s games. He saw the chair, pulled himself straight and moved towards it, his courage returning.

  ‘Why have you arrested me?’ he demanded, sitting down.

  Widodo brought his fist down on the table with a deafening crash. A flask of water fell to the floor and smashed.

  ‘Because, kamu, you are a liar! LIAR!’ he screamed.